Carlos Gussenhoven

Radboud University | RU · Centre for Language Studies

Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many...

In order to investigate the effect of time pressure on the execution of falling and falling-rising pitch movements on phrase-final syllables, we ran a production experiment with 119 speakers distributed over five regional varieties of West-Germanic spoken in the Netherlands and Standard Dutch. They realized nuclear Falls and Fall-Rises on four IP-f...

This volume brings together novel, original studies on prosody and prosodic interfaces. It consists of fifteen chapters, of which some look at word prosody and phrase prosody in individual languages, some examine the interactions between lexical tones and intonation, and others analyze the syntax-prosody interface. Despite much recent attention pai...

A listing of a dozen generalizations governing pitch accent locations in sentences in Nubi, Persian and English yields two findings that contradict current assumptions. First, only one of the generalizations has a phonological structural description, φ-based English Iambic Reversal, which refers to a constituents in the prosodic hierarchy. Second,...

We intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point a...

Köhnlein (2016) proposes to represent the Franconian tone contrast as a difference in foot structure, whereby Accent 1 appears in lexically marked syllabic trochees and Accent 2 in default moraic trochees, as an alternative to analyses with an underlying privative tone for Accent 2. After sketching the two approaches, we argue against three argumen...

Phonetic measures extracted from speech data produced by speakers of six West Germanic dialects spoken in the Netherlands reveal a pattern of variation that appears to reflect their geographical locations. From the southwest to the northeast, segmental durations increase, while falling movements are steeper and faster in the northeast than in the s...

Brief survey of differences in sentence accent placement between English and Dutch

A multi-speaker acoustic study on citation tones in Kaifeng Mandarin, referred to as LH, HL, H and L, shows that L is realized as three different subtypes by different speakers, i.e. dipping, falling and falling with lengthening, while generally being longer than the other three tones and frequently spoken with creaky voice in part of the vowel. Th...

Universally, phonological grammars have three structural features. First, there are segments (vowels, consonants, tones); second, there are constituents that contain them (the prosodic hierarchy); and third, there are two ways in which segments are anchored in constituents (phonological alignment and association). The specific segments and constitu...

The tonogenesis in Central Franconian German has been attributed to 13th century immigrant dialect speakers in Cologne with lengthened vowels in nouns, like [da:x] 'day' (cf. the conservative Cologne form [dax]). Because Cologne plurals had lost the final unstressed vowel, as in [da:x] 'days' (cf. [da:γƏ] in the immigrant dialects), a compromise st...

Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception ex...

Zwara Berber is a variety of Nafusi (ISO 639-3; Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016) which belongs to the eastern Zenati group within northern Berber (where Berber is the scientific term for Tamazight), a branch of Afro-Asiatic. Zwara (Zuwārah, Zuwara, Zuāra, Zuara, Zouara) is a coastal city located at 32.9° N, 12.1° E in Libya. The speakers refer to thems...

Understanding Phonology, Fourth Edition provides a clear, accessible and broad introduction to Phonology. Introducing basic concepts, it provides a comprehensive account of phonological issues such as segmental contrasts; syllables and moras; quantity, tone, intonation and stress; feature geometry; and prosodic constituent structure. This new editi...

No stress, no pitch accent, no prosodic focus: the case of Ambonese Malay – erratum - Volume 33 Issue 3 - Raechel Maskikit-Essed, Carlos Gussenhoven

This article details a correction to the article:Gussenhoven, C. (2016). Analysis of Intonation: the Case of MAE_ToBI.'Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology','7'(1), 10. DOI:http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.30

Varieties of Malay, including Indonesian, have been variously described as having word stress on the penultimate syllable, as having variable word stress and as having a phrase-final pitch accent without word stress. In Ambonese Malay, the alignment of sentence-final pitch peaks fails to support the existence of either word stress or phrase-final p...

Annotation systems for intonation contours are ideally based on a well-motivated phonolog-ical analysis of the language in question, such that instances of indecision are restricted to uncertainties over what intonational structure the speaker has used, rather than over the choice of label in situations where no suitably distinctive label is availa...

This study examined the effects of focus on the realization of non-final nuclear falls in five varieties along the Dutch North-Sea coast. While phonetic effects surfaced more clearly in some varieties than others, we found no dialect-specific responses to the focus manipulation. In line with the findings for Standard Dutch reported in [1], focus ov...

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the Persian word accent disappears in two putative 'deaccenting' contexts, post-focal regions and 'presupposed' embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perceptio...

Like non-verbal communication, paralinguistic communication is rooted in anatomical and physiological factors. Paralinguistic form-meaning relations arise from the way these affect speech production, with some fine-tuning by the cultural and linguistic context. The effects have been classified as “biological codes,” following the terminological lea...

A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on...

The experiment file and the audio stimuli. (ZIP)

Supplemental statistics. Contains an alternative analysis in which perfect reversed responses were excluded from the data. (DOCX)

The data used in the analysis. (XLSX)

Clitic types. Contains a brief characterization of Persian clitics, with supplemental references [45][46][47]. (DOCX)

Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese; 上海话) is a Wu dialect (ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken in the city of Shanghai (CN-31), one of the four municipalities in the People's Republic of China. Over the last century, the dialect has been heavily influenced by neighbouring dialects spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, such as Jianghuai Mandarin (江淮官...

The prosodic structure of languages is divided into word prosody and sentence prosody. Beyond an organization of vowels and consonants into syllables, languages may have segmental length, tone, and stress, in any combination. The prosodic structure of words can be inferred from their pronunciation by abstracting away from the phonological phrasing...

A reading experiment was designed to examine the effects of word boundaries and metrical structure on the temporal alignment of the accentual peak and the end of the fall in nuclear rising-falling accents. Participants were speakers of a number of closely related dialects and languages from the coastal area of the Netherlands and North-West Germany...

There is no motivation for collapsing the prosodic structure of words and the prosodic structure of sentences of English into a single representation that expresses degrees of stress or prominence. Word stress is represented as foot structure, while sentence prosody is represented in terms of phonological phrasing and the distribution of pitch acce...

This second volume contains detailed surveys of the intonational phonology of fourteen typologically diverse languages, described in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Unlike the first volume, half of the languages, which vary in their word prosody as well as their geographic distribution, are understudied languages or researched through fieldwo...

Co-occurrence restrictions on tones and consonants in Yuhuan Wu Chinese syllables provide a powerful illustration of the phonetic basis of phonological contrasts, with sonorant contexts allowing more tone contrasts than other contexts. Interestingly, the language also reveals that the phonetic implementation of tones depends on the phonological con...

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W. The documentation o...

The shape of pitch contours has been shown to have an effect on the perceived duration of vowels. For instance, vowels with high level pitch and vowels with falling contours sound longer than vowels with low level pitch. Depending on whether the comparison is between level pitches or between level and dynamic contours, these findings have been inte...

Gussenhoven, Carlos (2000). On the origin and development of the Central Franconian tone contrast. In: A. Lahiri (ed.), Analogy, Levelling, Markedness: Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 215-260.

O artigo mostra que as diferenças fonéticas entre os dois tons do dialeto Limburguês falado em Venlo, Holanda, percebidas por falantes nativos e por falantes do holandês padrão se correlacionam discretamente com o grau de identificação dos tons pelos falantes nativos, numa grande variedade de contextos entonacionais. Entre as medidas acústicas feit...

Persian words have prominence on the last syllable. Right-edge clitics fall outside this word domain, and segmentally identical words and word-plus-clitic combinations therefore contrast for the location of the prominence. Two experiments were conducted to answer two questions. A production experiment addressed the question whether any phonetic cue...

Chinese learners of Dutch and a control group of native speakers of Dutch were presented with 26 sentences in the order they come in a story, visually as well as auditorily as spoken with four intonation contours. Participants were instructed to select the most appropriate intonation contour for each sentence in a forced choice task. Chinese partic...

The lexical tone and intonation contrasts in the Limburgish dialect of Maastricht are remarkable in a number of ways. While a falling pitch contour on an IP-medial syllable signals a non-declarative intonation, on an IP-final syllable it signals a declarative intonation. In addition, although there is a binary tone contrast (Accent 1 vs. Accent 2)...

The dialect of Helden (Netherlands) maintains intonational contrasts between the fall, the fall-rise, the low rise and the high rise, while also having a binary lexical tone contrast in (accented or unaccented) final syllables in the IP as well as in accented IP-internal syllables. The lexical tone contrast, which is an instance of the Central Fran...

An experiment was conducted to study how Mandarin Chinese speakers of Dutch produced three Dutch pitch contours (Fall, Rise and Fall-rise) on final syllables in the intonational phrase. It was found that the Fall-Rise was the hardest contour for them to produce. In addition, there were substantial differences between the subjects with higher and th...

The strategies adopted by native speakers of Dutch and Chinese speakers with different levels of proficiency in Dutch in the realization of degrees of focus enhancement were significantly different on six variables. The participants with higher proficiency did not outperform the learners with lower proficiency. The Chinese subjects appear to abstai...

The chapter contrasts two conceptualizations of English prosody. One is in terms of discrete phonological representations, foot structure to represent stressed and unstressed syllables, and accent, to represent accented and unaccented stressed syllables. The other is in terms of gradient levels of strength, prominence, or stress, typically represen...

A corpus of Dutch falling–rising intonation contours with early nuclear accent was elicited from nine speakers with a view to establishing the extent to which the low F0 target immediately preceding the final rise, was attracted by a post-nuclear stressed syllable (PNS) in either of the last two words or by Second Occurrence Contrastive Focus (SOCF...

Discussion of Quentin Atkinson's (2011) finding of a correlation between segment inventory complexity and distance from southwest Africa as measured along recent migration routes. And of the factors shaping such inventories. And of the desirerability to not so much consider the present-day functions of earlier-developed features in technology, biol...

Eleven Dutch secondary school children sang and spoke the lyrics of a number of popular English songs. Their pronunciation accuracy was rated significantly higher in the singing mode by a group of native speakers. Additional perception scores showed that the decrease in Dutch-accentedness must be due to the fact that their foreign accent could not...

Small acoustic differences in duration, intensity and vowel formants were found between initial and final accented target words in Persian, by the side of substantial differences in f0. On the basis of these data and the results of a perception experiment in which an f0 continuum was superimposed on a single source utterance, we conclude that Persi...

The stress system of Dutch belongs to the more complex word prosodic systems that have been reported. As usual, stress is culminative, there being a single most prominent syllable, and obligatory, meaning that all words have a primary stress (Halle and Idsardi 1995; Hyman 2012). As for culminativity, every word has one primary stressed syllable, wh...

A perception experiment was conducted to study how well Chinese learners of Dutch identify the correct accentuation patterns in six categories of Dutch sentences. Thirty-six stimuli (6 sentences x 6 categories) were presented to 20 Dutch native listeners (NLD) and 20 Chinese learners of Dutch as a second language (CLD). In a forced-choice task, lis...

An MEG experiment was carried out in order to compare the processing of lexical-tonal and intonational contrasts, based on the tonal dialect of Roermond (the Netherlands). A set of words with identical phoneme sequences but distinct pitch contours, which represented different lexical meanings or discourse meanings (statement vs. question), were pre...

Persian clitic groups differ from words. Most importantly, a pitch accent (L+)H* is associated with the word-final (i.e. base-final) syllable of clitic groups, but with the word-final syllable of words, meaning that clitics remain outside the domain of the word. The pitch accent marks the stress, but we found no independent durational or spectral d...

The results of a perception experiment in which Nigerian English listeners judged the well-formedness of Nigerian En-glish intonation contours suggests that the language has tonal specifications for each syllable, including syllables that are unstressed in British English. The association of pitch accents to accented syllables in British English ex...

An MEG experiment was carried out in order to compare the processing of lexical-tonal and intonational contrasts, based on the tonal dialect of Roermond (the Netherlands). A set ofwords with identical phoneme sequences but distinct pitch contours, which representeddifferent lexical meanings or discourse meanings (statement vs. question), were prese...

Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language,...

Despite the greatly improved understanding of tonal articulation in Standard Chinese, no consensus has been reached on the most appropriate model of tonal implementation [Xu, Y., & Wang, Q. (2001). Pitch targets and their realization: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Speech Communication, 33, 319–337; Kochanski, G., & Shih, C. (2003). Prosody modeli...

Seventeen speakers of Standard Dutch participated in a production experiment that investigated the effects of focus condition (broad, narrow, corrective focus) on the prosodic realization of nuclear accented words in declarative sentences. It was found that focus has an effect on the duration of onset and coda of the nuclear accented syllable as we...

A perception task elicited judgments from 20 Dutch listeners involving a choice between a modal and a lexical meaning of three ambiguous words in Dutch. On the basis of descriptions in the literarture, it was hypothesized that the lexical interpretation is favored if (a) there is an intonational boundary between the ambiguous word and the following...

The word accent contrast in the Central and Low Franconian dialects of German and Dutch amounts to a contrast between the absence of lexical tone (Accent 1) and its presence (Accent 2). Together with the intonational tones, lexical tones are integrated into a single representation in all the dialects investigated, but dialects vary considerably in...

Two production experiments were conducted to establish the anchor point for the beginning of the final rise in Dutch falling-rising pitch contours. We systematically varied the prosodic structure of the post-nuclear words by including the stress level (primary or secondary) of the penultimate syllable and the distance of the last stressed syllable...

The development of theories about form-function relations in intonation should be informed by a better understanding of the dependencies that hold among different phonetic parameters. Fine phonetic detail encodes both linguistically structured meaning and paralinguistic meaning.

A production experiment was carried out in order to establish the ways in which speakers of Dutch adjust the pitch contours of three frequently used nuclear contours, the Fall, the Rise, and the Fall-Rise, in phrase-final syllables with varying amounts of sonorant segmental material in the rime. It was found that the Fall and the Rise were somewhat...

This article clarifies the distinction between the meaning associated with the structural elements making up an intonation contour (linguistic meaning), and paralinguistic meaning, which derives from the way an intonation contour is pronounced. Phrasing, pitch accent distribution, and choice of pitch accent contribute to the linguistic meaning of a...