Bettina Braun

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• MA Dr Phil
• Professor (Full) at University of Konstanz

We tested German nine-month-olds' reliance on pitch and metrical stress for segmentation. In a headturn-preference paradigm, infants were familiarized with trisyllabic words (weak-strong-weak (WSW) stress pattern) in sentence-contexts. The words were presented in one of three naturally occurring intonation conditions: one in which high pitch was al...

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair (red scissors, given purple scissors) when instructions to click on it carried a contrastive accent on the co...

This study investigates whether listeners’ familiarity with an intonation contour affects speech processing. In three experiments, Dutch participants heard Dutch sentences with normal intonation contours and with unfamiliar ones and performed word-monitoring, lexical decision, or semantic categorisation tasks (the latter two with cross-modal identi...

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alte...

Although the pitch of the human voice is continuously variable, some linguists contend that intonation in speech is restricted to a small, limited set of patterns. This claim is tested by asking subjects to mimic a block of 100 randomly generated intonation contours and then to imitate themselves in several successive sessions. The produced f0 cont...

The German focus-sensitive particle auch (‘too’) can associate with different constituents (ACs) in an utterance. In terms of position, it can precede or follow its AC. There is a strong preference for using preceding auch when the AC is the object. In three sentence fragment arrangement tasks, we investigated whether speakers are structurally prim...

German infants have been shown to be able to segment trochaic words from speech from around nine months of age [1-4]. These studies have highlighted the role of intonation in this task: [2] and [4], for instance, demonstrated that only high-pitched stressed syllables are interpreted as onsets of trochaic units by German nine-month-olds. Here, we te...

Diverse linguistic environments not only include multiple languages but also multiple varieties of a language. Germany is characterised by a range of different dialects that differ in syntax, lexicon, morphology and phonology (e.g., Kehrein, Lameli & Rabanus 2015). In many rural parts of Germany, dialects are used for daily communication, along wit...

Speakers use corrective focus as an explicit way to correct misunderstandings in communication. We investigate whether immersive contact with a rhythmically different language affects the production and perception of duration as a cue to corrective and non–corrective focus. We tested twenty-eight native speakers and sixty-four native listeners of U...

When investigating phonological representations in infants, accurately quantifying the phonological variability in children’s input (e.g., induced by regional accents) can be challenging and time-consuming. Here, we test whether subjective ratings of perceived dialect strength, an efficient way of capturing dialectal variability, are a reliable and...

German children growing up in dialectal areas often encounter Standard German word forms (e.g., [fuːs], Fuß, “foot”) and dialectal forms that can be very similar to the Standard German form (e.g., [fu͡əs]). The two word forms must ultimately be stored in the mental lexicon but it is unclear how these lexical representations develop (cf., van der Fe...

Infrastructure comprises a combination of sociotechnical, political, and cultural arrangements that provide resources and services. The contributors to this volume show, in their respective fields, how infrastructures are both generative forces and the materialized products of quotidian practices that affect and guide people's lives. Organized via...

Background: This poster displays research from my Undergraduate Thesis Project during my BA in Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. Together with my supervisors Prof. Dr. Bettina Braun and Marieke Einfeldt, we investigated two generations of L1 Cantonese speakers in their production of two types of German diphthongs: underlying [aɪ̯] and [aʊ̯...

The theory of cross-linguistic influence predicts that languages influence each other, leading to phonetic realizations that differ between monolingual und bilingual speakers. This paper tested heritage speakers, examining the influence of Cantonese on the realization of two kinds of German diphthongs, underlying ([aɪ̯ ], [aʊ̯ ]) and derived ([iːɐ̯...

We conducted two experiments to investigate what triggers sarcasm between close friends and whether the factors prompting sarcastic comments in production are also shared with an external observer. In Experiment 1, participants freely reacted to different types of situations in written form and rated their perception of the given contexts, the leve...

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese...

This paper tested the ability of Mandarin learners of German, whose native language has lexical tone, to imitate pitch accent contrasts in German, an intonation language. In intonation languages, pitch accents do not convey lexical information; also, pitch accents are sparser than lexical tones as they only associate with prominent words in the utt...

Words in an unfamiliar accent (regional or foreign) are recognized only towards the second year of life [1-3]. So far, we know very little about word recognition in children who grow up with two varieties of one language at a time (‘bi-varietal’ children). In fact, their lexical representations might be more flexible compared to their mono-varietal...

The intonational realization of utterances is generally characterized by regional as well as inter- and intra-speaker variability in f0. Category boundaries thus remain “fuzzy” and it is non-trivial how the (continuous) acoustic space maps onto (discrete) pitch accent categories. We focus on three types of rising-falling contours, which differ in t...

The speech signal has been shown to contain a fine structure that consists of the fast changing spectral content (e.g., formant transitions, voicing, spectral energy distributions), together with amplitude modulations of the envelope with different timescales. These different modulation frequencies have been associated with linguistic units of diff...

This paper provides a survey of our knowledge of the prosody of rhetorical questions, i.e. questions that do not require an answer and try to commit the listener to the presupposed answer, as compared to the prosody of string-identical genuine, information seeking-questions. The survey includes semantic literature on questions, corpus data, and exp...

While echo questions (EcQs) are often said to be identified by their prosodic properties, there is no empirical study actually supporting such claim. Focusing on wh-utterances we provide results from a production study, a classifier, and a perception study to argue that prosody is not a reliable cue to identify an inquisitive utterance as EcQ. We a...

Variability is pervasive in spoken language, in particular if one is exposed to two varieties of the same language (e.g., the standard variety and a dialect). Unlike in bilingual settings, standard and dialectal forms are often phonologically related, increasing the variability in word forms (e.g., German Fuß “foot” is produced as [fus] in Standard...

Listeners perceive high or rising pitch as stressed – at the word and sentence level (high-pitch bias). Since stressed syllables can also be low-pitched, this bias may lead to misinterpretations of word and sentence stress and thus slow down speech comprehension. We investigate the effect of immediate exposure with high- vs. low-pitched stressed sy...

Many studies relate acoustic voice quality measures to perceptual classification. We extend this line of research by training a classifier on a balanced set of perceptually annotated voice quality categories with high inter-rater agreement, and test it on speech samples from a different language and on a different speech style. Annotations were don...

As first observed by Ladd in 1981, English polar questions with high negation (e.g., Aren’t they adding a menu item?) can be used both to check the speaker’s belief that the proposition p is true (e.g., p = they are adding a menu item) and to check the addressee’s belief that p is not true (¬ p). We hypothesized that this ambiguity can be disambigu...

This article contributes to our knowledge about the prosodic realisation of rhetorical questions (RQs) as compared to information-seeking questions (ISQs). It reports on a production experiment testing the prosody of English wh- and polar RQs and ISQs in a Canadian variety. In previous literature, the contribution of prosody to the distinction betw...

This chapter aims to give an overview of the state of the art on the research of sentence prosody (i.e. the prosodic properties beyond the word level) in a second language, L2. This is complemented by two aspects of perception: L2 speech or foreign accents by listeners of the native language (L1) and L1 speech by L2 listeners (for L2 word prosody s...

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...

We investigate the intonation of information seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Icelandic. The results for ISQs largely confirm observations in previous literature based mostly on introspective data: polar questions are mostly realized with L*+H nuclear accents, wh-questions with H* accents; wh-questions often start high (%H, H*). Ill...

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking questions (ISQs) in German for two question types, polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth wh-questions). The results are as follows: Phonologically, polar RQs were mainly realized with H-% (high plateau), while polar ISQs mostly ended in H-^H% (hi...

This study investigates how pitch accent type and additive particles affect the activation of contrastive alternatives. In Experiment 1, German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flappers) and saw four printed words displayed on screen: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver),...

Contrasts such as rising versus falling intonation contours play an important role in language development as they may signal a difference in illocution type. In languages such as Portuguese and Basque, intonation is the sole means to differentiate polar questions from statements, while languages such as English or German additionally use morpho-sy...

Speakers of different languages accommodate pitch movements differently when sonorant material runs short: English speakers tend to compress pitch movements in both nuclear falling and rising contours, while German speakers compress rises and truncate falls. Yu & Zahner (2019) showed that German learners of English compressed rises and truncated fa...

Previous processing studies have shown that constituents that are prosodically marked as focus lead to an activation of alternatives. We investigate the processing of constituents that are prosodically marked as contrastive topics. In German, contrastive topics are prosodically realized by prenuclear L∗+H accents. Our study tests (a) whether prenuc...

In many languages, rhetorical questions (RQs) are produced with different prosodic realizations than string-identical information-seeking questions (ISQs). RQs typically have longer constituent durations and breathier voice quality than ISQs and differ in nuclear accent type. This paper reports on an identification experiment (Experiment 1) and an...

Annotating intonation is a considerable challenge, since not only intonational form but also its meaning are complex in terms of their internal make-up and contextual variation. Since the advent of the au-tosegmental-metrical approach to intonation in the 1980s, the annotation of intonation has continued to be a matter of debate, witnessed by the c...

This presentation reports on the first experimental study investigating question intonation in Modern Icelandic. Specifically, we carried out a production experiment to investigate the intonation of polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth wh-questions). The most important results are that (a) the boundary tone does not distinguish be...

Annotating intonation is a considerable challenge, since not only intonational form but also its meaning are complex in terms of their internal make-up and contextual variation. Since the advent of the au-tosegmental-metrical approach to intonation in the 1980s, the annotation of intonation has continued to be a matter of debate, witnessed by the c...

In intonation languages, pitch accents are associated with stressed syllables, therefore accentuation is a sufficient cue to the position of metrical stress in perception. This paper investigates how stress perception in German is affected by different pitch accent types (with different f0 alignments). Experiment 1 showed more errors in stress iden...

The purpose shapes the vocative: Prosodic realisation of Colombian Spanish vocatives – CORRIGENDUM - Clara Huttenlauch, Ingo Feldhausen, Bettina Braun

This study investigates the production and perception of prosodic cues to realize narrow and corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi. We recorded SOV sentences with the target con- stituents at the preverbal position. Our results show that cor- rectively focused nouns have longer syllable duration, wider F0 range, early alignment of F0 peaks, variant produc...

This paper reports on a production experiment investigating the prosodic realization of rhetorical questions (RQs) as compared to information seeking questions (ISQs) in Icelandic. It looks at two question types: polar questions (Borðar einhver límónur? 'Does anybody eat limes?') and wh-questions (Hver borðar límónur? 'Who eats limes?'). The main r...

The question of whether intonation contours directly signal meaning is an old one. We revisit this question using vocatives in Colombian Spanish (Bogotá). We recorded speakers' productions in three pragmatic conditions – greeting, confirmation-seeking, and reprimand – and compared proper names (vocatives) to situation-specific one-word utterances,...

In everyday life we use subtle ways to communicate desires, often without explicitly saying so. Asking questions is one way to indirectly utter desires. Questions with an additional non- truth-conditional aspect are referred to as biased [1]: they are not plainly information seeking but additionally express an attitude towards one of the possible a...

Different polar question forms (e.g., Do you / Do you not / Don’t you / Really? Do you... have a car?) are not equally appropriate in all situations. The present experiments investigate which combinations of original speaker belief and contextual evidence influence the choice of question type in English and German. Our results show that both kinds...

Different polar question forms (e.g., Do you / Do you not / Don’t you / Really? Do you... have a car?) are not equally appropriate in all situations. The present experiments investigate which combinations of original speaker belief and contextual evidence influence the choice of question type in English and German. Our results show that both kinds...

The present study investigates non-local temporal adjustments before an upcoming length contrast in Italian minimal pairs that differ only in the length of the medial consonant (e.g., geminate word palla “ball” vs singleton word pala “shovel”). This contrast is reportedly signaled by the duration of the singleton/geminate consonant and of the prece...

Knowing about infants' input is a prerequisite for some theories of first language acquisition. Here, we present the first prosodically annotated infant-directed speech corpus in German (KIDS Corpus) – a tool for formulating hypotheses and modeling acquisition processes in the prosodic domain and at the prosody-syntax interface. The multi-layered c...

Previous research has shown that listeners from tonal languages are better at processing tone compared to speakers from non-tonal languages. However, most of this research has tested Asian tone languages, particularly those which have many tonal contrasts and a dense tone-to-syllable association. In this paper we investigate the mental representati...

Infant-directed speech exhibits slower speech rate, higher pitch and larger f0-excursions than adult-directed speech. Apart from these phonetic properties established in many languages, little is known on the intonational phonological structure in individual languages, i.e. pitch accents and boundary tones and their frequency distribution. Here, we...

Infant-directed speech exhibits slower speech rate, higher pitch and larger f0 excursions than adult-directed speech. Apart from these phonetic properties established in many languages, little is known on the intonational phonological structure in individual languages, i.e. pitch accents and boundary tones and their frequency distribution. Here, we...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information-seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh-questions) in rhetorical a...

This paper presents newly developed guidelines for prosodic annotation of German as a consensus system agreed upon by German intonologists. The DIMA system is rooted in the framework of autosegmental-metrical phonology. One important goal of the consensus is to make exchanging data between groups easier since German intonation is currently annotate...

Theories of information structure argue that focus involves alternative sets; experimental studies have also shown that narrowly focused constituents lead to the activation of alternatives. However, narrow focus can be realized with different accent types, indicating the information status of the referent and it is unclear whether it is focus domai...

Infants exposed to stress-timed languages take stressed syllables as preferred word onsets (e.g., Bartels, Darcy, & Höhle, 2009; Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999). Braun, Pohl, and Zahner (2014) recently showed that German infants’ perception of stress is modulated by utterance-level intonation: In a head turn preference paradigm, German 9-month-o...

Word stress is an important yet abstract linguistic concept. In stress-timed languages metrical prominence plays a crucial role in speech perception: infants use linguistic rhythm resulting from interstress intervals to identify their native language and acquire parts of their phonology [1] and listeners rely on stress for word segmentation [2], po...

Only high-pitched stressed syllables are good (prominent?) word onsets for German 9-month-olds: intonation modulates the extraction of embedded words Stressed syllables are characterized by increased prominence, thus standing out from their linguistic environment ([1]). When segmenting speech, infants acquiring a stress-timed language take these un...

Only high-pitched stressed syllables are good word onsets for German infants German infants use stressed syllables for segmentation [1], but their stress perception depends on utterance-level intonation [2]: In a head turn preference paradigm, 10-month-olds segmented embedded trochees from trisyllabic carriers in an f0peak-stress-association condit...

Infant-directed speech exhibits slower speech rate, higher pitch and larger f0-excursions than adult-directed speech. Apart from these phonetic properties established in many languages, little is known on the intonational phonological structure in individual languages, i.e. pitch accents and boundary tones and their frequency distribution. Here, we...

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g., The child ate the candies following after The child did not eat the cand...

We present a novel interactive approach for the visual analysis of intonation contours. Audio data are processed algo-rithmically and presented to researchers through interactive visualizations. To this end, we automatically analyze the data using machine learning in order to find groups or patterns. These results are visualized with respect to met...

To resolve lexical competition, listeners use both segmental (e.g., Allopenna et al., 1998) and suprasegmental information (e.g., Reinisch et al., 2010; Sulpizio & McQueen, 2012) as soon as it becomes available. Even though in intonation languages pitch is not lexically contrastive, listeners rely on the pitch contour to decide between lexical cand...

Previous research has shown that from 7.5 months of age infants use rhythmic patterns to extract words from speech, relying on stressed syllables in English or German (Jusczyk et al., 1999, Bartels et al., 2009). At the same time, artificial language studies show that 7.5-month-old infants exploit pitch in order to group disyllables (Bion et al., 2...

Native language prosodic structure is known to modulate the processing of non-native suprasegmental information. Dupoux et al. (1997) showed that native speakers of French, a language without lexical stress, have difficulties storing non-native stress contrasts [Dupoux E, Pallier C, Sebastián N and Mehler J (1997) A destressing “deafness” in French...

In two headturn preference experiments, we tested whether German infants' segmentation strategies are sensitive to the position of a pitch peak relative to the stressed syllable. Specifically, we compared target words with early-peak accents (where the pitch peak is early with respect to the stressed syllable, i.e. H+L* accents) and medial-peak acc...

Binomials (e.g., German Ebbe und Flut; 'ebb and flow') are a common phenomenon of many languages, but little is known about how they are stored, produced and processed. We tested the production of German nominal binomials and compared their onset latency to the onset latency of forms in which one part of the binomial was replaced by an alternative...

Our study deals with the durational structure of Italian words with a medial geminate or singleton consonant (e.g., palla "ball" vs. pala "shovel"). Specifically, we investigated the duration of the word-initial consonant (e.g., [p]) and found that the onset consonant was longer in geminate than in singleton words. A comparison to German word pairs...

This study compares how Dutch and German, two closely related languages, signal a shift from a negative to a positive polarity in two contexts, when contrasting the polarity relative to a different topic situation (In my picture the man washes the car following after In my picture the man does not wash the car, henceforth polarity contrast) and whe...

Binomials (e.g., German Ebbe und Flut; 'ebb and flow') are a common phenomenon of many languages, but little is known about how they are stored, produced and processed. We tested the production of German nominal binomials and compared their onset latency to the onset latency of forms in which one part of the binomial was replaced by an alternative...

German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French--owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity o...

Previous studies have shown that speech processing is accelerated for familiar voices in contrast to unfamiliar ones (e.g. [1]), and for familiar intonation in contrast to unfamiliar intonation [2]. The present experiments probed these effects in a single experiment and tested whether they also occur with short, implicit familiarization. Results of...