Evaluating radio news intonation - autosegmental versus superpositional modelling

This study examines prosodic correlates of the givenness of discourse entities in German radio news sp eech. The material comes from the Stuttgart Radio News Corpus. Both GToBI intonation labels and a Fujisaki-style parametrization of the intonation contour were examined. We find strong word-class specific accentuation defaults; the influence of entity status is rather small and varies with word class. However, there are strong influences of newness on phrasing. The results of autosegmental and superpositional approaches complement each other nicely.

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