This study reports a production experiment and acoustic analysis of Papuan Malay prosody in different contrastive focus conditions. These conditions were created by collecting descriptions of pictures with different shapes and colors. The prosody of these descriptions was examined by measures of F0, which were statistically analyzed using generalized additive mixed models. These models provide a relatively novel way to analyze F0 as a contour. Results show that speakers of Papuan Malay do not use F0 to mark contrastive focus and support the idea that prosodic phenomena are confined to the final syllable(s) in a phrase. While the absence of prosodic marking provides a crucial difference with respect to some Western-Germanic languages, the boundary phenomena observed in this study rather indicate similarities.
Cite as: Kaland, C., Himmelmann, N.P. (2020) Time-series analysis of F0 in Papuan Malay contrastive focus. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 230-234, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-47
@inproceedings{kaland20_speechprosody,
author={Constantijn Kaland and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann},
title={{Time-series analysis of F0 in Papuan Malay contrastive focus}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={230--234},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-47}
}