Pre-boundary lengthening in a cross-linguistic perspective
Final Report Abstract
Phrasing is an important prosodic means to disambiguate syntactic structures. Phrase boundaries are indicated by means of lengthening prior to an upcoming boundary. Our experimental data revealed that in German the lengthening starts on the stressed syllable, but the exact initiation point depends on the prosodic structure (i.e. stress location) and the segmental composition (i.e. presence of coda consonants) of the phrase-final word. Thus, in line with findings from other languages, the scope of PBL in German is determined by the prosodic structure as well as the segmental composition of the phrase-final word. Our data further revealed that the lengthening mechanism might interact with pause realization as another marker of prosodic boundaries in German. Our data for Tswana revealed that there are two lengthening mechanisms at play in this language, preboundary lengthening on the final syllable and penultimate lengthening on the penultimate syllable. These two lengthening mechanisms are independent of each other. Together with the German data, our project revealed intricate lengthening mechanisms at prosodic boundaries which are sensitive to segmental and suprasegmental structure, and might show interdependencies with further boundary markers, such as pauses. Our empirical work (both the collection of production data in French and Tswana as well as the pilot for a perception study) was severely challenged by the COVID pandemic. Despite advances on remotely collecting speech data, there still persist challenges with remote recordings: One crucial aspect is the quality of the data. Due to the acoustic measures that were envisaged in this project, high quality of the recordings was central for this project. Another aspect relates to the experimental method, as it needs to be ensured that the experimental task is self-explanatory and can be conducted fully unsupervised. Whereas a straight forward reading task might be less problematic in this respect, the lack of supervision posed a challenge for our complex experimental set-up at the interfaces of prosody and pragmatics.
Publications
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Phonetic content and phonological structure affect pre-boundary lengthening in German. Speech Prosody 2020, 111-115. ISCA.
Schubö, Fabian & Zerbian, Sabine
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An exploration into Penultimate and Final Lengthening in Tswana (Southern Bantu). - Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 62(0).
Schubö, Fabian; Bekker, Ian; Pretorius, Rigardt; Wagner, Valencia & Zerbian, Sabine
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Vowel length affects pre-boundary lengthening in Czech. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 166-170. ISCA.
Spina, Nadja & Schubö, Fabian
