@article {347, title = {The prosodic marking of the contrast between restrictive and appositive clause in Dutch}, year = {2007}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

It is well known that there are prosodic differences between restrictive versus appositive relative clauses in English. In a current project we are in the process of establishing the phonetics of the prosodic marking of this contrast in Dutch, in both speech production and perception. In my talk today I will report results of a pilot experiment with a speech-technology orientation. We ask to what extent Dutch listeners are sensitive to the prosodic marking of the difference between the two clause types, and by implication, if the quality of a text-to-speech system can be improved if the contrast is properly modelled in the prosodic component of the TTS.

We resynthesized Dutch sentences whose lexico-syntactic properties are compatible with either a restrictive or an appositive interpretation of a relative clause (but never both). We generated multiple versions of each sentence by systematically varying (i) presence versus absence of domain-final lengthening before the onset of the relative clause (ii) presence versus absence of a physical silence at the onset of the relative clause and (iii) the melodic configuration at the boundary. Four different melodies were used, which were hypothesized to mark the absence or presence of a prosodic boundary with different degrees of strength.

Listeners were ask to judge for each stimulus on a scale from 0 to 10 how well the speaker read the stimulus, where {\textquoteleft}0{\textquoteright} stood for {\textquoteleft}very poorly/inappropriately read{\textquoteright} and 10 represented {\textquoteleft}read perfectly{\textquoteright}).

Our results indicate that domain-final lengthening and the presence of a physical pause at the beginning of the relative clause are dispreferred for the restrictive type. Melody seems to contribute very little to the contrast.

}, author = {Vincent van Heuven} }