Creativity and Variability in the Perception of Prosody and Focus Marking in German

Jabeen F, Wagner P, Hartmann J. Creativity and Variability in the Perception of Prosody and Focus Marking in German. In: 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI). Grenoble: ISCA; 2021: 142-146.The interplay between accentuation patterns and information structure has received considerable attention in the field. The current study aims to investigate the extent to which German listeners are tolerant of (mis)matching accentuation presented in wide and contrastive narrow focus contexts. In a perception experiment, we presented our participants with sentences produced with congruent accentuation in terms of the elicited focus context as well as with mismatching accentuation. The mismatches comprised accent type only or both accent type and position. The participants rated the appropriateness of each accentuation pattern presented in narrow or wide focus contexts. The analysis of their ratings showed that German listeners are sensitive to (mis)matches in accentuation type and position in different focus contexts. The listeners dispreferred mismatching accent type in wide focus when L* nuclear accent was replaced with L+H*. However, replacing L+H* in narrow focus with L* received high appropriateness ratings. Participants also preferred the earlier placement of nuclear pitch accent in wide focus, while dispreferring the mismatching accent position in narrow focus context. Furthermore, they varied in their tolerance for different types of mismatching input. This indicates that German listeners are sensitive to variation in terms of accent type and position as well as focus marking