Phonetic experiments on the word and sentence prosody of Betawi Malay and Toba Batak

This study describes the effects of prominence and boundary on the temporal and melodic structures of two Indonesian languages, viz. Toba Batak, a stress language and Betawi Malay, a non-stress language. Experimental evidence shows that lengthening effects were more than twice as strong in the non-stress Betawi Malay as in Toba Batak. Durational prominence effects in Toba Batak are comparable to those found in western stress language at the word level, but not at the lower levels: stress syllables, especially consonants are hardly affected. Arguably, the use of duration as a stress correlate is restricted by the phonemic consonant contrast in the language. To compensate for this, prominence-related pitch movements, which are connected to the stressed syllable, occur in non-prominent as well as prominent words in Toba Batak. In Betawi Malay, prominence-related pitch movements are larger but vary considerably in shape and position; they serve to cue accents and boundaries, but not stress position. To determine the audible consequences of the native language for the production of Dutch stress, three perception experiments were run. The native language clearly affects the prosody of second-language speech. Toba Batak speakers of Dutch sound more acceptable to Dutch listeners than Betawi Malay speakers do.LEI Universiteit LeidenTheoretical and Experimental Linguistic