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Several decades of research, focusing on English, Dutch and German, have set up a hierarchy of acoustic properties for cueing lexical stress. It attributes the strongest cue to criterial-level f0 change, followed by duration, but low weight to energy and to stressed-vowel spectra. This paper re-examines the established view with new data from German. In the natural productions of the German word pair Kaffee 'coffee' - Café 'locality' (with initial vs. final stress in a North German pronunciation), vowel duration was manipulated in a complementary fashion across the two syllables in five steps, spanning the continuum from initial to final stress on each word. The two base words provided different vowel qualities as the second variable, the intervocalic fricative was varied in two values, long and short, taken from Café and Kaffee, and the generated test words were inserted in a low f0 tail and in a high f0 hat-pattern plateau, which both eliminated f0 change as a cue to lexical stress. The sentence stimuli were judged in two listening experiments by 16 listeners in each as to whether the first or the second syllable of the test word was stressed. The results show highly significant effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and fricative duration. The combined vowel-quality and fricative variable can outweigh vowel duration as a cue to lexical stress. The effect of the prosodic frame is only marginal, especially related to a rhythmic factor. The paper concludes that there is no general hierarchy with a fixed ranking of the variables traditionally adduced to signal lexical stress. Every prosodic embedding of segmental sequences defines the hierarchy afresh., (Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

This paper takes a new look at the traditionally established divide between sounds and prosodies, viewing it as a useful heuristics in language descriptions that focus on the segmental make- up of words. It pleads for a new approach that bridges this reified compartmentalization of speech in a more global communicative perspective. Data are presented from a German perception experiment in the framework of the Semantic Differential that shows interdependence of f0 contours and the spectral characteristics of a following fricative segment, for the expression of semantic functions along the scales questioning - asserting, excited - calm, forceful - not forceful, contrary - agreeable. The results lead to the conclusion that segments shape prosodies and are shaped by them in varying ways in the coding of semantic functions. This implies that the analysis of sentence prosodies needs to integrate the manifestation of segments, just as the analysis of segments needs to consider their prosodic embedding. In communicative interaction, speakers set broad prosodic time windows of varying sizes, and listeners respond to them. So, future phonetic research needs to concentrate on speech analysis in such windows., (Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

A theoretical framework for speech reduction is outlined in which 'coarticulation' and 'articulatory control' operate on sequences of 'opening-closing gestures' in linguistic and communicative settings, leading to suprasegmental properties - 'articulatory prosodies' - in the acoustic output. In linking this gestalt perspective in speech production to the role of phonetic detail in speech understanding, this paper reports on perception experiments that test listeners' reactions to varying extension of an 'articulatory prosody of palatality' in message identification. The point of departure for the experimental design was the German utterance ich kann Ihnen das ja mal sagen 'I can mention this to you' from the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech, which contains the palatalized stretch [k̟(h)ε̈n(j)n(j)əs] for the sequence of function words /kan i.n(kə)n das/ kann Ihnen das. The utterance also makes sense without the personal pronoun Ihnen. Systematic experimental variation has shown that the extent of palatality has a highly significant influence on the decoding of Ihnen and that the effect of nasal consonant duration depends on the extension of palatality. These results are discussed in a plea to base future speech perception research on a paradigm that makes the traditional segment-prosody divide more permeable, and moves away from the generally practised phoneme orientation., (Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

This paper presents an exploratory study in the field of emphasis in German. It provides a comprehensive acoustic analysis for a type of emphasis that intensifies lexical meanings either positively or negatively. A speech corpus was recorded using an elicitation method adapted to yield natural-sounding, conversational, expressive speech under controlled conditions. Supporting the distinction between positive and negative intensification, two clearly different phonetic profiles emerged. These phonetic profiles of positive and negative intensification involve voice quality as well as the dynamics of the speech signal across its segmental and prosodic layers. By means of these profiles, the intensifying emphases were correctly classified by a discriminant analysis as positive or negative in around 90% of the cases. Moreover, indications were found for a third type of intensifying emphasis, which was called 'reinforcement'. Its multidimensional phonetic profile falls in between the ones of positive and negative intensification., (Copyright © 2010 S. Karger AG, Basel.)