Prosodic signalling of (un)expected information in South Swedish – An interactive manipulation experiment

Starting from the German pitch peak timing categories and their communicative functions, it is asked how these functions would be expressed in South Swedish. The aim is to get a first im-pression as regards potentially relevant prosodic parameters as-sociated with the expression of expected vs. unexpected in-formation in South Swedish. For that, an interactive manipu-lation experiment is conducted, where subjects manipulate the pitch contour and duration of monosyllabic test utterances until the sound output adequately represents a given communicative function. Swedish has a tonal word accent distinction, and all test words have accent 1, normally produced with an early pitch fall. It is thus hypothesized that in South Swedish, expected vs. unexpected information will not be expressed through a differ-ent pitch peak timing, as in German. The results indeed clearly hint at unexpected information being signalled by means of a higher, rather than a later pitch peak. 1