Truncation and compression in Southern German and Australian English

Jenny Yu, Katharina Zahner

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

![CDATA[Nuclear pitch accents are realized differently when there is little sonorant material (as in monosyllabic compared to disyllabic words): Southern British English speakers compress rises and falls, while Northern German speakers truncate falls and compress rises [1] (Grabe 1998). This leads to different phonetic surface patterns for final falls. Within these languages, dialectal variation affects alignment and the frequency of occurrence of nuclear tunes. We test whether the differences in compression and truncation use are a stable cross-linguistic phenomenon (and occur in other varieties of English and German) or whether they are limited to the varieties tested in [1]. Here, we investigated productions of rises and falls in Australian English and Southern German in words with different proportions of sonorant material. Australian English speakers compressed rises and falls, while Southern German speakers only compressed rises but truncated falls, consistent with Grabe's findings for Southern British English and Northern German. This indicates consistent use of strategies within a language, even though the varieties under investigation display other phonetic differences from previous varieties tested. We discuss implications of these findings for automatic labelling.]]
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of INTERSPEECH 2018, 2-6 September 2018, Hyderabad, India
PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
Pages1833-1837
Number of pages5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
EventINTERSPEECH (Conference) -
Duration: 2 Sept 2018 → …

Publication series

Name
ISSN (Print)2308-457X

Conference

ConferenceINTERSPEECH (Conference)
Period2/09/18 → …

Keywords

  • English language
  • German language
  • accents and accentuation
  • intonation (phonetics)
  • speech perception

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Truncation and compression in Southern German and Australian English'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this