ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002

The manifestation of linguistic information in prosodic features of Finnish

Hansjörg Mixdorff, Martti Vainio, Stefan Werner, Juhani Järvikivi

The current paper presents a preliminary study of Finnish prosody using a quantitative model. In a small corpus of segmentally identical utterances the focus, the sentence mode and the place of the phrase boundary were systematically varied. Following the rationale of MFGI, the Mixdorff- Fujisaki Model of German intonation, the phonetic properties of the contrast-lending intonemes were examined. These properties differ strongly from those of German: Although the place of narrow focus is marked by higher accent command amplitudes, tone switches on pre-focal and postfocal accents are never completely deleted. Yes/no questions with final rises are perceived as less natural by Finnish listeners than those marked by a question particle. Nonterminal utterances are not marked by clear rises, but rather by a fall that does not reach the lower edge of the speaker's F0 range as in declaratives.