@article {493, title = {Focus and accent in English}, year = {2021}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {online}, abstract = {Contrastive focus in English is marked with a rising accent (autosegmentally L+H*) and broad (all new) focus with a high accent (H*). However, inconclusive production and perception evidence supports the idea that L+H* is simply an emphatic version of H*, not phonologically distinct from it. We used Rapid Prosody Transcription to test these two views. Forty-seven speakers of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) listened to 86 SSBE utterances and marked the words they considered prominent or emphatic. Accents (N = 281) were independently coded as H* or L+H* using phonetic criteria, and as contrastive or non-contrastive using pragmatic criteria. If L+H* is an emphatic H*, L+H*s should be rated more prominent than H*s; if the accents encode a pragmatic distinction, contrastive accents should be rated more prominent than non-contrastive ones. The results showed effects of both accent and pragmatics (L+H* > H*; contrastive > non-contrastive) and no interaction. Contrastive L+H*s were rated most prominent, non-contrastive H*s least prominent, while non-contrastive L+H*s and contrastive H*s had average and almost identical ratings. Participants used different strategies: some focused on accent type, others on pragmatics, and still others made neither distinction. These results suggest that a reason for the continuing debate about H* and L+H* may be that the accents form a weak contrast which some speakers acquire and attend to while others do not. Similarly, researchers who focus on contrastive L+H* and non-contrastive H* see distinct categories, while those who focus on non-contrastive L+H*s and contrastive H*s tend to see a continuum.}, author = {Arvaniti, Amalia and Gryllia, Stella and Zhang, Cong and Katherine Marcoux} } @article {446, title = {Pitch in native and non-native Lombard speech}, year = {2018}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands}, abstract = {Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is acoustically different from speech produced in quiet (e.g. higher Fundamental Frequency (F0), increase in amplitude, and decrease in spectral tilt) and has extensively been studied in natives (e.g. Summers et al. 1988). To investigate whether non-native Lombard speech is different from native Lombard speech we recorded 30 Dutch natives reading 144 sentences in Dutch and English and 9 American-English natives in English, in quiet and noise (hearing 83 dB SPL Speech-Shaped Noise). We additionally manipulated the location of focus in the sentence, having early and late focus sentences. Our analysis using linear mixed effect models indicates that the Dutch show an increase in F0 in both Dutch and English Lombard speech as compared to their speech produced in quiet. These results show that non-natives also produce Lombard speech. The American-English data are more complex, only showing a difference in F0 between speech produced in quiet and Lombard speech in sentences with late-focus, due to post-focal compression. These results suggest that pitch-changes in Lombard speech are more language specific than originally thought. Moreover, they suggest that acquiring a new language involves learning how pitch changes in that language{\textquoteright}s Lombard speech.}, author = {Katherine Marcoux and Mirjam Ernestus} }