Date: Thursday 27 March 2014
Title: Adapting to atypical prosody: contrastive noun phrases in Dutch and Italian
Time: 13.15-15.00u
Venue: Lipsius 235c
Abstract
This study investigates to what extent the prosody produced by speakers in a conversation is dependent on the prosody of their interlocutor and to what extent on constraints imposed by the prosodic rules of the speakers’ native language. We know from earlier work that speakers may adapt to the pitch level (F0) of their interlocutors. In addition, we know that the speaker’s native language requires a certain prosody that may be language-specific, for instance regarding the distribution of pitch accents. In particular, languages differ in the extent to which intonation patterns can be shifted, with so-called plastic languages such as Dutch being more flexible than non-plastic languages such as Italian in this respect. In this study we investigate how these differences relate to the extent to which speakers adapt their prosody to their interlocutor. Therefore, a production experiment elicited contrastive noun phrases from Dutch and Italian speakers, interacting with an interlocutor who produced prosodic structures that were either typical or atypical in the language. Analysis of the produced pitch and perceived prominence of the NPs indicated that speakers of Dutch adapt their accent structure to that of an interlocutor, while speakers of Italian do not adapt in this way.