Production and perception of prosodic cues in narrow & corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi

Abstract

This study investigates the production and perception of prosodic cues to realize narrow and corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi. We recorded SOV sentences with the target constituents at the preverbal position. Our results show that correctively focused nouns have longer syllable duration, wider F0 range, early alignment of F0 peaks, variant production of downtrend, and less steep post-focal compression as compared to narrowly focused nouns. We further set up a perception experiment to investigate if the difference in syllable duration of narrowly and correctively focused constituents is perceptible to Urdu/Hindi speakers. We manipulated syllable duration of the target constituents and presented them in contexts via a webbased interface. Twenty-nine respondents rated the naturalness of manipulated sentences in the given contexts. The analysis of respondents’ ratings indicated that while they accepted both long and short durations in narrow focus, they rated long duration significantly better in corrective focus. Our results lend support to earlier claims about the prosodic cues of corrective focus in Urdu/Hindi and bring new evidence regarding the perceptual relevance of duration to cue corrective focus.