2008/10/29

Fournier, R., Verhoeven, J., Swerts, M., & Gussenhoven, C. (2006). Perceiving word prosodic contrasts as a function of sentence prosody in two Dutch Limburgian dialects. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 29–48.

Presentation: Chris

Summary: Sarah

This study investigated the effects of focus and position on the perception of prosodic contrasts in two Dutch Limburgian dialects – Roermond and Weert. These two dialects differ in prosodic realizations. Whereas prosodic contrasts are realized as tonal differences in Roermond dialect, Weert dialect utilizes duration differences. One example is the realization of grammatical numbers. The singular and plural forms are segmentally the same, but they are tonally different in the Roermond dialect, while durationally different in the Weert dialect. This study thus predicted that the prosodic contrasts in the sentence condition would be perceived worse in the Roermond dialect than in Weert dialect, since tonal differences would be much more influenced by sentence intonation than durational differences. An experiment was designed accordingly. Target words were nouns prosodically differing in grammatical number, and they were embedded into sentences of different focus conditions at various sentence positions. The subjects’ task was to listen to the stimuli, either of the whole sentence or the excised target words, and decide the grammatical number. Results showed that as predicted, it was more difficult for the Roermond dialect speakers to recognize the grammatical number, especially in non-focus and non-final conditions, due to the fact tonal differences were neutralized by intonation. In addition, the stimuli of the excised version were poorly recognized by Roermond dialect speakers, but not Weert dialect speakers. These results verified that the perception of tonal contrasts was dependent on intonational contexts. On the contrary, the perception of durational contrasts was independent of intonational contexts.