Prosodic Properties of Contrastive Utterances in Spontaneous Speech.

Abstract

This study examines phonological and phonetic properties of contrastive referential expressions. An interactive holiday tree decoration task provided sequences of ornaments to prompt production of target noun phrases in spontaneous conversation. This paper presents an analysis of a subset of referential expressions that were uttered in contrastive discourse contexts, focusing on the production of L+H* vs. H* accents. Blind ToBI analysis revealed that contrastive adjective was produced most frequently with L+H*, whereas the contrastive noun was produced more frequently with H* than with L+H*. The relative F0 height measures showed more consistent relations to the accent choices than the relative durational measures.