Phonetic Realization of Prosodic Focus in Persian

"In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression (PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian. It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus perception in Persian. Native speakers of Persian listened to sentences produced with focus in different positions as well as the neutral-focus sentence, and judged the presence and location of focus. Results show that final focus is identified much less well than other types of focus, and most of its confusion is with neutral focus. This shows that the presence of PFC is a main factor in recognizing prosodic focus in Persian."

2012

The present study investigates how focus is phonetically realized in declarative and interrogative sentences in Persian. Focus is usually interpreted as contrastive focus in this language. That is, the contrasted element is chosen out of a closed set of entities and bears heavy stress. In this study, 12 native speakers of Persian recorded short declarative and interrogative sentences including Clitic Group and Phonological Word in neutral and focal conditions. The results show small acoustic differences in duration, intensity and spectral information between initial and final accented target words in neutral and focus conditions in Persian, by the side of substantial differences in f0.

This paper is an attempt to test PENTA, an articulatory-functional model, on Persian focus prosody. The test was done on a corpus consisting of utterances with different focus conditions using PENTAtrainer2, a trainable prosody synthesizer that optimizes categorical pitch targets each corresponding to multiple communicative functions. The evaluation was done by comparing the F0 contours generated by the extracted pitch targets to those of natural utterances through numerical and perceptual evaluations. The numerical results showed that the synthesized F0 was close to the natural contour in terms of RMSE (= 1.94) and Pearson’s r (= 0.84). Perceptual evaluation showed that the rate of focus identification and naturalness judgement by native Persian listeners were highly similar between synthetic and natural F0 contours.

2014

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words. This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent. The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable. If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently. Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf "

Focus When a speaker utters a sentence, certain information in the sentence is emphasised more than the others, and this linguistic phenomenon is generally known as focus. Under a certain discourse condition, some parts of a sentence might as well get highlighted (Bolinger, 1958; Eady & Cooper, 1986; Ladd, 2008; Xu, 1999). Such a phenomenon can be manifested ABSTRACT Many studies across languages have recognised that focus substantially alters the prosodic structure of a sentence not only by increasing F0, intensity, and duration of the focused words but also by compressing the range of pitch and intensity of the post-focus words. Studies, however, are still not fully clear regarding the main effects of focus on focused and post-focused words in Malay. Analyses from the present study revealed that on-focused words had significantly increased F0, intensity, and duration, while post-focused words showed no significant lowering following the effect of focus. The outcomes of the study g...

Speech Communication

This paper presents findings of the first systematic acoustic analysis of focus prosody in Hijazi Arabic (HA), an under-researched Arabic dialect. A question-answer paradigm was used to elicit information and contrastive focus at different sentence locations in comparison with their neutral focus counterparts. Systematic acoustic analyses were performed to compare all the focus conditions, in terms of both continuous F 0 trajectories and specific acoustic measurements. Results show that focused words have significantly expanded excursion size, higher maximum F 0 and longer duration. Post-focus words have significantly lowered F 0 (except in the case of penultimate focus). Pre-focus words, in contrast, lack systematic changes. These patterns are consistent with previously reported prosodic patterns of focus in other Arabic dialects. They are also consistent with a number of others languages that have also been applied similar systematic acoustic analyses. Thus Arabic appears to belong to a group of languages that all exhibit post-focus compression (PFC), as opposed to languages that lack PFC. In addition, the results also show evidence of prosodic differences between contrastive focus and information focus. This difference, however, is interpreted as due to a methodological feature that allowed elicitation of incredulity related to contrastive focus, rather than as a language-specific property. It is also argued that the possible involvement of incredulity in focus marking needs further research.

UPenn Ph.D. dissertation, 2015

The fact that “purely” prosodic marking of focus may be weaker in some languages than in others, and that it varies in certain circumstances even within a single language, has not been commonly recognized. Therefore, this dissertation investigated whether and how purely prosodic marking of focus varies within and across languages. We conducted production and perception experiments using a paradigm of 10-digit phone-number strings in which the same material and discourse contexts were used in different languages. The results demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus varied across languages. Speakers of American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Standard French clearly modulated duration, pitch, and intensity to indicate the position of corrective focus. Listeners of these languages recognized the focus position with high accuracy. Conversely, speakers of Seoul Korean, South Kyungsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese, and Suzhou Wu produced a weak and ambiguous modulation by focus, resulting in a poor identification performance. This dissertation also revealed that prosodic marking of focus varied even within a single language. In Mandarin Chinese, a focused low/dipping tone (tone 3) received a relatively poor identification rate compared to other focused tones (about 77% vs. 91%). This lower identification performance was due to the smaller capacity of tone 3 for pitch range expansion and local dissimilatory effects around tone 3 focus. In Seoul Korean, prosodic marking of focus differed based on the tonal contrast (post-lexical low vs. high tones). The identification rate of high tones was twice as high than that of low tones (about 24% vs. 51%), the reason being that low tones had a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion than high tones. All things considered, this dissertation demonstrates that prosodic focus is not always expressed by concomitant increased duration, pitch, and intensity. Accordingly, “purely” prosodic marking of focus is neither completely universal nor automatic, but rather is expressed through the prosodic structure of each language. Since the striking difference in focus-marking success does not seem to be determined by any previously-described typological feature, this must be regarded as an indicator of a new typological dimension, or as a function of a new typological space.

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

To examine the relative roles of language-specific and language-universal mechanisms in the production of prosodic focus, we compared production of five different types of focus by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Two comparable dialogues were constructed for each language, with the same words appearing in focused and unfocused position; 48 speakers recorded two dialogues each in their respective native language. Duration, F 0 (mean, maximum, range), and rmsintensity (mean, maximum) of all critical word tokens were measured. Across the different types of focus, cross-language differences were observed in the degree to which English versus Mandarin speakers use the different prosodic parameters to mark focus, suggesting that while prosody may be universally available for expressing focus, the means of its employment may be considerably language-specific.

9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018

This study investigates the production and perception of prosodic cues to realize narrow and corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi. We recorded SOV sentences with the target constituents at the preverbal position. Our results show that correctively focused nouns have longer syllable duration, wider F0 range, early alignment of F0 peaks, variant production of downtrend, and less steep post-focal compression as compared to narrowly focused nouns. We further set up a perception experiment to investigate if the difference in syllable duration of narrowly and correctively focused constituents is perceptible to Urdu/Hindi speakers. We manipulated syllable duration of the target constituents and presented them in contexts via a webbased interface. Twenty-nine respondents rated the naturalness of manipulated sentences in the given contexts. The analysis of respondents' ratings indicated that while they accepted both long and short durations in narrow focus, they rated long duration significantly better in corrective focus. Our results lend support to earlier claims about the prosodic cues of corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi [1, 2] and bring new evidence regarding the perceptual relevance of duration to cue corrective focus.

2007

Author(s): Scarborough, Rebecca | Abstract: This paper examines the intonational correlates of focus in Farsi. Data are presented from two native Farsi speakers illustrating focus (contrastive focus, in particular) in several different types of constructions. Descriptively, focus is characterized by a pitch accent with an extra high F0 followed by deaccenting and dephrasing to the end of the intonational phrase. Some possible phonological analyses of this pattern in the data are considered. They are further evaluated with respect to several other non-focus constructions that are phonetically similar to focus (i.e., which also involve deaccenting and dephrasing). Finally, a unified phonological analysis of focus and other deaccenting phenomena is suggested.