Anja Arnhold

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking : Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, f0, duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger f0 ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development.

Complex prosodic focus marking in Finnish: Expanding the data landscape

Abstract By investigating prosody beyond pitch and duration, this article provides a detailed and multifaceted picture of focus marking in a language that differs substantially from more extensively studied languages like English. A production study examined prosodic focus marking in Finnish based on acoustic analyses of 947 short SVO sentences spoken by 17 native speakers. The results indicated effects of information structure on five acoustic measures: f0, duration, intensity, the use of pauses and non-modal voice quality. Words in narrow focus had a larger f0 range, longer duration, larger intensity range and were followed by pauses more often than words in other information structural conditions. Conversely, contextually given words showed a smaller f0 range, shorter duration, and, in post-focal condition, lower intensity. Moreover, realisations with non-modal voice quality were more frequent for all syllables of post-focal given words compared to the broad focus condition, whereas for words in narrow focus, non-modal realisations were more frequent only on the last syllable. Observing these effects in parallel, the findings exceeded previous studies in scope, providing encouragement for a broader approach to the investigation of prosodic focus marking.

What do compounds and noun phrases tell us about tonal targets in Finnish

This article compares three accounts of Finnish intonation using a perception experiment with manipulated f0 contours. The experiment involved compound/noun phrase minimal pairs differing in f0 pattern. To address the question of tonal specification, manipulations changed f0 contours of recorded compound words, associating them with f0 patterns having different components of the naturally occurring f0 rise-fall contour. Thus, the study investigated which tonal targets were crucial for the perception of a complete tonal contour inducing a noun phrase interpretation. Results suggested that the falling part of the rise-falls, modelled as realisations of a high and a following low target, was essential. They furthermore revealed evidence for these targets being associated with prosodic phrases, as well as for Finnish tonal targets being characterised by a flexibility that contrasts with accent realisations in languages like English.

Phonetic correlates of phonological quantity of Yakut

We investigated vowel quantity in Yakut (Sakha), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia by over 400,000 speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. Yakut is a quantity language; all vowel and consonant phonemes have short and long contrastive counterparts. The study aims at revealing acoustic characteristics of the binary quantity distinction in vowels. We used two sets of data: (1) A female native Yakut speaker read a 200-word list containing disyllabic nouns and verbs with four different combinations of vowel length in the two syllables (short–short, short–long, long–short, and long–long) and a list of 50 minimal pairs differing only in vowel length; (2) Spontaneous speech data from 9 female native Yakut speakers (aged 19–77), 200 words with short vowels and 200 words with long vowels, were extracted for analysis. Acoustic measurements of the short and long vowels’ f0-values, duration and intensity were done. Mixed-effects models showed a significant durational difference between...