Phonetic and phonological aspects of prosodic focus marking in Canadian English

Abstract

Previous studies reported mixed findings regarding the details of the acoustic correlates of focus, as well as the relationship between information structure and pitch accent types in English. Moreover, previous studies showed that different varieties of English signal information structure differently. Therefore, we hypothesized that the way focus is expressed in terms of acoustic correlates and/or pitch accents in Canadian English would differ from Mainstream American English (MAE). Thirty-eight native speakers of Canadian English produced 24 short transitive sentences in different focus conditions: broad focus and narrow focus on different constituents (subject, verb, object). The speakers of Canadian English in the current study manifested some, but not all the acoustic effects of focus that have been reported in previous research on MAE and other varieties. Specifically, focus-induced lengthening and amplitude increase were observed but not enhancement of f0. Instead, focus-adjacent constituents were weakened in terms of duration, intensity and f0. As for the pitch accents produced by the same speakers, while the presence or absence of pitch accents was strongly associated with whether a constituent was focused or not, the different types of pitch accents did not correlate with information structure.