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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Asymmetric processing of lexical tonal contrast in Swedish
Verena Felder1, Elisabet Jönsson-Steiner, Carsten Eulitz
1Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany. verena.felder@uni-konstanz.de
Abstract:
Languages such as Swedish use suprasegmental information such as tone, over and above segments, to mark lexical contrast. Theories differ with respect to the abstractness and specification of tone in the mental lexicon. In a forced choice task, we tested Swedish listeners' responses to words with segmentally identical first syllables differing in tonal contours (characterized as Accents 1 and 2). We assumed Accent 1 to be lexically specified for a subset of words and hypothesized that this specification would speed up word accent identification. As was predicted, listeners were fastest in choosing the tonally correct word when the accent was lexically specified. We conclude that the processing of surface tonal contours is governed by their underlying lexical structure with tonal specification.
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