We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janne Lorenzen (Köln University)
Title: Exploring individual variability in prominence production
Date: Wednesday, 02.11.2022
Time: 16-18
Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (if necessary, we will stream the talk via Zoom)
If you are registered in Olat you’ll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori AT lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Abstract:
Prosodic prominence is known to be multifaceted, encompassing a variety of cues related to timing, spectral properties and the F0 contour (Baumann & Winter 2018, Roessig et al 2022). It is therefore a reasonable assumption that speakers differ in which of these cues they prioritize in their prominence production. This has been shown to be true, for example, in the case of focus-marking (Cangemi et al. 2015).
In this talk, I will present an exploratory analysis of inter-speaker variability in the prosodic encoding of information status in German, looking at several prominence cues such as duration, tonal onglide and pitch accent type. Results will show how and to what extent speakers vary in their production of prosodic prominence, whether they exploit the full range of available cues or reduce this redundancy by focusing only on select cues. I will also show that some speakers prioritize the same cues, thus forming clusters of, for example, f0-driven or duration-driven speakers.
Throughout the talk, I will touch upon methodological challenges in investigating individual differences and discuss reasons for and against going beyond group averages in prosodic analyses.