How do native English speakers express focus with prosody?
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Native English speakers express focus with prosody by utilizing various acoustic cues such as f0 range, f0 maxima, f0 minima, duration, intensity, and pitch accents. The alignment of lexical stress and focus prosody influences the phonetic realization of contrastive focus, with the stressed syllable of focused words being marked by overall prominence or pitch movements. Additionally, English speakers exhibit an innovative intonation pattern characterized by pitch declination and vocal fry, affecting their ability to use pitch rises to mark focus on phrase-final nouns. Furthermore, listeners can entrain to different combinations of preceding prosodic cues from various speakers to predict where focus will fall in an utterance, demonstrating both speaker variability and listener flexibility in processing prosodic focus.
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2 Citations | Native English speakers express focus with prosody by varying cues like F0, duration, and intensity before the focused word onset, showing speaker variability and listener flexibility in processing prosodic focus. |
1 Citations | Native English speakers express focus with prosody by using pitch peaks on focused adjectives and nouns, although some younger speakers exhibit a unique intonation pattern with vocal fry. |
| Native English speakers express focus with prosody by using f0 range, f0 maxima, f0 minima, duration, and intensity, which are independent of syntax, showing additive effects rather than a trade-off. | |
| Native English speakers align pitch accent tonal targets with lexical stress to express focus prosody. The phonetic realization varies based on the stress pattern of the focused word. | |
2 Citations | Native English speakers express focus with prosody by using a L + H* pitch accent on the focused word followed by deaccenting post-focus words, as shown in the study on English focus prosody. |
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