PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Using a prominence-based speech synthesizer of German, different patterns of prosodic prominence have been examined as to whether they are capable of consistingly creating an impression of "contrastive focus". The results confirm the conclusions of previous phonological and phonetic analyses, that the impression of contrast is best explained by a specific prosodic pattern. Such a pattern can be characterized by postfocal "deaccentuation" and/or high perceptual prominence on the contrastively stressed syllable, the latter correlating with a (high) pitch accent an increase in duration. Thus a notion of perceptual prominence as a relational parameter ought to be able to model contrastive focus, because it is able to capture such contextual phenomena.