Presentation: Li-Fang
Summary: Sheng-Fu
Acoustic analyses and a perceptual
experiment were conducted to examine how sentence prosody affected word
prosodic contrasts in two Dutch Limburgian dialects: Roermond and Weert.
Sentence prosody was manipulated by varying the focus status and position of
the target words, whose grammatical number surfaces through an opposition
between Accent 1 and Accent 2. In the perceptual experiment, participants
listened to stimuli from their own dialect and had to identify the grammatical
number of the target word. Acoustic analyses showed that as reported in the
literature, Roermond speakers indeed used pitch contours to differentiate
Accent 1 and Accent 2, but the contrast was not realized in non-focus
conditions. Weert speakers, on the other hand, used vowel duration instead of
pitch contour for word prosodic contrasts. Results of the perceptual experiment
were analyzed with the CART method (Classification And Regression Trees), which
could identify the significant effects and the relative importance of factors. The
outcome of the CART analysis showed that sentence prosody was the most
significant predictor in Roermond Dutch, and no significant effect was
identified for Weert Dutch. To conclude, Roermond Dutch speakers’ production
and perception of accent contrast relied on pitch realization and was very
context dependent, while Roermond Dutch speakers contrasted accents with
duration, which was less affected by sentence prosody.
