INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Effects of Focus on f_0 and Duration in Irish (Gaelic) Declaratives

Amelie Dorn, Ailbhe Ní Chasaide

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

This pilot study investigates the effects of focus (broad, narrow and contrastive) on tonal patterns, f0 scaling and duration of accented syllables and rhythmic feet for a controlled dataset in Donegal Irish. Results show differences in pre-focal tonal patterns between broad focus and the other focus types. Narrow and contrastive focus renditions are implemented by largely the same phonetic means. Focused domains are overall longer in duration and have wider f0 excursion than broad focus. Durational differences depend on sentence position.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dorn, Amelie / Chasaide, Ailbhe Ní (2011): "Effects of focus on f_0 and duration in irish (gaelic) declaratives", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 965-968.