원문정보
초록
영어
This study investigated whether sentence-initial pitch peaks increase proportionally with sentence length in both English and Korean, particularly under prosodic focus. We hypothesized that longer sentences would allow speakers to enhance focus prosody more effectively by raising pitch peaks compared to shorter sentences. To test this, production experiments were conducted with six native speakers of each language, who produced target sentences under neutral- and narrow-focus conditions. Target stimuli ranged from three to five words. The results showed that sentence-initial pitch peaks systematically increased with sentence length in both languages, confirming a positive relationship between initial pitch height and utterance length. This pattern suggests that speakers raise initial peaks as a strategy to accommodate longer utterances, reflecting a universal prosodic tendency. However, the increase in initial pitch height was nearly twice as large in English as in Korean, as confirmed by linear mixed-effects models. This cross-linguistic difference indicates that English speakers employ higher initial pitch peaks when marking prosodic focus, thereby exhibiting a language-specific prosodic pattern.
목차
II. Method
1. Stimuli
2. Participants
3. Recording Procedure
4. An overview of sample pitch contours
5. Acoustic Measurements
III. Analyses and Results
IV. Discussion and Conclusion
Works Cited
Abstract
