Prosodic Signalling of (Un)Expected Information in South Swedish Gilbert Ambrazaitis Linguistics and Phonetics Centre for Languages and Literature

Pitch Peak Timing in German and English... peak timing → pragmatic contrast How is this pragmatic contrast expressed... ●...in Swedish in general? ●...in South Swedish in particular? What is “this pragmatic contrast”? ● Difficult to capture by a single functional parameter (or semantic scale) → Start with “expected – unexpected”

The Swedish Word Accents Example: “Jag har sett anden.” → Accent 1: “I have seen the duck.” → Accent 2: “I have seen the ghost.” South Swedish: → Accent 1: early pitch fall (peak at syllable onset) → Accent 2: late pitch fall (peak at syllable offset)

Accent 1 Accent 2

General Research Questions Swedish: Pitch timing is utilized on a lexical level. ● Can it still be used to express pragmatic contrasts – as in German and English? ● If yes, to what degree? ● Different capacities for Accent 1 and Accent 2 ? Original Accent 2

A Pilot Study: Hypotheses and Aims Aim →a preliminary insight into the prosodic signalling of “(un)expected information” in South Swedish Accent 1 words in monosyllabic utterances Two competing hypotheses H1 – Accent 1 pitch fall is always early. → word accent contrast preservation (CP) → Functional parameter “(un)expected” cannot cause a later timing H2 – No word accent distinction for monosyllabic words. → word accent CP is irrelevant → Timing may be affected by (un)expected information

Interactive Manipulation Experiment “From Function to Signal”, sorry! Subjects adjust acoustic parameters themselves until test utterance sounds “expected” “neutral” “unexpected” Material: monosyllabic utterances “Röd.” (red) “Blå.” (blue) “Gul.” (yellow)

Procedure and subjects ● Material recorded monotonously at medium pitch level by a native speaker of South Swedish ● Six subjects (2 female, 4 male), aged 30-58; ➔ Subject 4 = speaker of test material ● Subjects used praat manipulation windows ● Instructions in written form, 3 sheets: ➔ (1) introduction, (2) instructions, (3) working sheet

Situational Setting Introduction sheet Two friends are having a small chat. A: ”By the way, Lasse has finally bought a new car!” B: ”Really! It’s high time! So what colour did he choose?” A: ”Blue” (or ”Yellow” or ”Red”). Three possible intonation patterns and their meanings were explained by paraphrases: "Blue, as everybody would have expected." → expected “Blue, isn't it strange?”→ unexpected “Blue.”→ neutral

Results – general tendencies ● Duration manipulation was used, but hardly systematically with respect to the functional contrast. ● Pitch manipulation was used to distinguish between all three functional categories by most of the subjects. ● Only “unexpected” was assigned more or less the same prosodic expression by all subjects. ● With some exceptions, only falling pitch patterns were created.

Results – pitch timing Measurements of peak timing for the falling contours by 5 subjects: → temporal distance vowel onset – F0 maximum [ms]

Results – pitch height Measurements of peak height for the falling contours by 5 subjects: [Hz]

Example: manipulations for test word blue by one subject neutral expected unexpected

Discussion (1/2) A preliminary result: In South Swedish Accent 1 utterances, (un)expected information is not signalled through durational means... is not signalled through a pitch peak timing contrast... but more likely through differences in pitch height. → Support for H1 (no later timing for 'unexpected') BUT: pitch fall not convincingly early → no clear case of contrast preservation → no support for H2, only partial support for H1

Discussion (2/2) Refinement of the method ● Functional contrasts must be explained more carefully ➔ Concept 'neutral' is problematic ➔ Situational setting: who says what (and why and where...) ? ● Other technical solutions? ➔ Scroll bars instead of parameter curves? Open questions / future research ● Investigate peak height – unexpected information more systematically ● How unimportant is timing? → methodological artefact? ● Attempt to elicit the pragmatic contrasts ● What happens in Accent 2 words? ● Investigate spontaneous speech data (“from signal to function”) ● What would German subjects do (with German materials)?

Thank You!