The phonetic exponency of phrasal accentuation in French and German

Abstract The a coustic -phonetic properties of words spoken with threedifferent levels of accentuation (de -accented, pre -nuclear andnuclear accented in broad -focus and nuclear accented innarrow -focus) are examined in question -answer elicited sent -ences and iterative imitations (on the syllable da ) pro duced bysix French an d six German speakers. Normalised parametervalues allow a comparative weighting of the properties em -ployed in differentiating the three levels of accentuation. Cleardifferences are found between French and German in theweighting hierarchy of the acoust ic properties.Index Terms : phrasal accentuation, broad and narrow focus ,duration, fundamental frequency, spectral balance, formants 1. Introduction Most languages employ prominence -giving mechanisms tohigh light the informational importance of particular words in aphrase (e.g., topic accent, focus accent). At s ome basic pro duct -ion level, the speaker invests more effort in these (accentu ated)words, and the observed acoustic effects are greater durationand intensity, higher or changing funda mental frequency (F