Prosodic effects of focus in Dutch declaratives

Abstract

Seventeen speakers of Standard Dutch participated in a production experiment that investigated the effects of focus condition (broad, narrow, corrective focus) on the prosodic realization of nuclear accented words in declarative sentences. It was found that focus has an effect on the duration of onset and coda of the nuclear accented syllable as well as on the timing, scaling, and slope of f0 targets and movements. A significant effect exists mainly between broad focus accents on the one hand, and narrow and corrective focus accents on the other. The results are interpreted in terms of phonetic variation, but such that phonetic differences between these two conditions are to a large extent conventionalized.