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Experimental Approaches to Focus

Special Session, Speech Prosody 2010

Prosodic focus is widely recognized as one of the essential components of speech prosody, and it has been a topic of much research for several decades. Yet many questions about focus remain unresolved today, for example:

• What is the functionality of focus, to indicate newness, to highlight important information, or to help build a prosodic hierarchy?
• What is the relationship between focus, stress, accent and prominence?
• How does focus interact with other prosodic functions?
• Does focus involve deaccenting and dephrasing?
• Can there be double focus or even multiple focus in a sentence? If so, how are they phonetically realized?
• Are there universals of prosodic focus, or are there typologically distinct patterns of focus among the world languages?

A promising way to find more definitive answers to these questions than have been seen before is to examine the fine phonetic details of prosodic focus by way of controlled experiments. We thus invite contributions that address these issues by reporting systematic experimental data, and we welcome in particular contributions that investigate understudied languages and dialects.

Papers for this special session are now listed in the conference program.

Organized by Yi Xu, University College London