Experimental investigations on the prosodic realization of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in German

• Experimental investigations on the prosodic differences of restrictive and appositive relative clauses.
• Prosodic integration of restrictive relative clauses (signaled by F0 and duration).
• Prosodic separation of appositive relative clauses (signaled by F0 and duration).
• No prosodic difference when there is no need to disambiguate the two types of RCs.
• The different prosodic structures reflect the respective syntactic structures.

This study reports on experimental investigations on the prosodic patterns of restrictive and appositive relative clauses (RRCs and ARCs) in German. RRCs and ARCs are associated with distinct prosodic patterns: While RRCs involve prosodic integration with their antecedent and may involve an accent shift from the antecedent to the determiner, ARCs are prosodically separated from their host clause. In the framework of two production experiments and one perception experiment, RRC and ARC constructions were tested in regard to F0 scaling, segment duration, silent pauses, and accent placement under different conditions. The results support the intuitive prosodic patterns described in the literature: ARC constructions were realized with higher F0 scaling and longer word duration preceding the relative clause, which indicates the presence of a prosodic phrase boundary, and accentuation of the determiner occurred only with RRC constructions. In perception, silent pauses were taken as cues to ARCs and accent shift as a cue to RRCs. These results suggest a difference in prosodic phrase structure reflecting the different syntactic structures. However, the production experiments also revealed that the prosodic differences are absent when the communicative situation does not require the disambiguation of the relative clause types.