Tonal Specification of Perceptually Prominent Non-nuclear Pitch Accents in Russian

Abstract

The paper deals with tonal characteristics of perceptually prominent prosodic words in the pre-nuclear part of the intonational phrase. The research is based on a 20 h part of the annotated Russian speech corpus CORPRES. Non-nuclear prominent words are grouped according to the direction of pitch movement on the stressed syllable. It is shown that the pitch accent shape on these words is highly correlated with the type of pitch movement on the nucleus. Most often, falling pre-nuclear accents occur with the rising nucleus, and rising—with the falling nucleus. Emotional or highly individual speech may contain more complex pitch movements in the pre-nuclear part (e.g. fall-rise), or a sequence of prominent words with the same pattern.