Hocus Focus - How prosodic profiles of contrastive focus emerge and change in different elicitation contexts

Abstract

The results of a production experiment with 8 native speakers of German show that the acoustic profiles of contrastive focus differ between read monologues, read dialogues and spontaneous dialogues. The differences suggest that contrastive focus is only a matter of F0, and that two F0-related subtypes, comparative and corrective focus, may be distinguished. The additional changes in duration and intensity that were found for corrective focus are not due to establishing an informationstructure contrast, but to signaling emphatic reinforcement.