The Sociophonetics of Prosodic Contours on NEG 135Experimental studies have shown that for speakers of Standard American
English, amplitude generally appears to co-vary with fundamental frequency;
du rat ion appears to be cor related with both sentent ial posit ion and focal prom-
inence. While amplitude increments can be ‘perceived’ as ‘accenting’ a word
even in the absence of a fundamental frequency change, this is not common
even in a carefully read corpus (Cutler, Dahan, van Donselaar 1997).
In Japanese (as in English), experimental studies demonstrate that fun-
damental frequency plays the primary role in both production and percep-
tion of focal prominence (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988; Venditti 2005),
whereas amplitude and duration also participate as subsidiary parameters
(Sugitou 1982; Koori 1989a, b; Azuma 1992).
In Spanish (Navarro-Tomás 1944; Sosa 1999; Face 2001, 2002; Este-
bas-Vilaplana 2007) and other Romance languages as well (Di Cristo 1998;
Dahan and Bernard 1997), focal prominence is produced primarily by vary-
ing fundamental frequency, while amplitude and durational prominence are
used primarily for other purposes.
In short, each of the three languages investigated here permits us to mea-
sure and code this primary parameter for prominence (F0) directly from the
pitchtrack, as shown on the example in Figure 5.1, taken from the ¿ rst Ken-
nedy/Nixon debate.
2.2 Cognition and prosodic salience
Bolinger (1978) proposed that prosodically emphasizing critical seman-
tic information is a cross-linguistic universal. Prosodic focal prominence
Figure 5.1 Examples of Pitch (F0), amplitude, and duration measures.