The Effect of Focus and Phrase Position on East Norwegian Lexical Tonal Accents

Abstract

Abstract Two experiments examined the acoustic correlates of the disyllabic tonal accent contrast in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian, and how narrow focus and phrasal position shape the contrast. Production results showed that both tonal accents have a high-low (HL) pitch contour, with different timing. In narrow focus, the pitch contrast was enlarged through asymmetrical F0 changes. When at the right edge of an accent phrase (AP), the accents were shown to have a higher L, lower AP H% tone, shorter stressed vowel, and longer final vowel. The alignment changes reflected tonal crowding while segmental modifications were due to the phrase-final lengthening in AP-final position. This work contributes to the literature on prosodic typology as well as on the implementation of prosodic focus and sentence intonation in languages with lexical pitch contrasts.