Acoustic correlates of focus in Marathi: Production and perception

Publication date: November 2017 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 65 Author(s): Preeti Rao, Niramay Sanghvi, Hansjörg Mixdorff, Kamini Sabu Focus or prominence is an important linguistic function of prosody. The acoustic realisation of prominence in an utterance, in most languages, involves one or more acoustic dimensions while affecting one or more words in the utterance. It is of interest to identify the acoustic correlates as well as their possible interaction in the production and perception of focus. In this article, we consider the acoustics of focus in Marathi. Previous studies on Hindi, the more researched member of the Indo-Aryan family, have reported that the well-known rising F0 pattern on non-final content words in an utterance becomes hyper-articulated when the word is in focus. The associated F0 excursion, duration and intensity increase and are accompanied by post-focal compression of pitch range. A preliminary goal of the present study was to verify whether Marathi exhibits similar behaviour. We used Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) structured utterances with elicited focus on each word by 12 native Marathi speakers. We observed that each narrow focus location is accompanied by a distinct set of local and global acoustic correlates in F0, duration and intensity which closely parallel previous observations on Hindi. F0 cues were also examined via the accent command amplitudes of the Fujisaki model. F0 range, duration and intensity were found to vary signi...
Source: Journal of Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research