Acoustic correlates of focus in Marathi: Production and perception

- We present a production and perception based study of the acoustic correlates of focus in Marathi.
- An increase in F0 excursion, duration and intensity of the focus word are accompanied by post-focal compression of F0 range.
- While duration increase occurs on the stressed syllable, F0 movement is aligned with the final syllable of the word.
- The perception study reveals that the duration changes dominate over F0 cues.

Focus or prominence is an important linguistic function of prosody. The acoustic realisation of prominence in an utterance, in most languages, involves one or more acoustic dimensions while affecting one or more words in the utterance. It is of interest to identify the acoustic correlates as well as their possible interaction in the production and perception of focus. In this article, we consider the acoustics of focus in Marathi. Previous studies on Hindi, the more researched member of the Indo-Aryan family, have reported that the well-known rising F0 pattern on non-final content words in an utterance becomes hyper-articulated when the word is in focus. The associated F0 excursion, duration and intensity increase and are accompanied by post-focal compression of pitch range. A preliminary goal of the present study was to verify whether Marathi exhibits similar behaviour. We used Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) structured utterances with elicited focus on each word by 12 native Marathi speakers. We observed that each narrow focus location is accompanied by a distinct set of local and global acoustic correlates in F0, duration and intensity which closely parallel previous observations on Hindi. F0 cues were also examined via the accent command amplitudes of the Fujisaki model. F0 range, duration and intensity were found to vary significantly with focus condition prompting a study to examine their relative importance in the perceptual judgement of focus. Perception testing with synthetically manipulated utterances revealed that duration cues are interpreted in a categorical manner, relatively uninfluenced by the pitch cues. Only when duration is ambiguous, does the on-focus F0 cue appear to play a role. An explanation for this may lie in the normal F0-rise characteristic of the content words in Marathi, making pitch a less dependable functional cue for focus.