@article{KueglerGenzel2012,
  author    = {K{\"u}gler, Frank and Genzel, Susanne},
  title     = {On the prosodic expression of pragmatic prominence The case of pitch register lowering in Akan},
  series = {Language and speech},
  volume    = {55},
  journal   = {Language and speech},
  number    = {9},
  publisher = {Sage Publ.},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {0023-8309},
  doi       = {10.1177/0023830911422182},
  pages     = {331 -- 359},
  year      = {2012},
  abstract  = {This article presents data from three production experiments investigating the prosodic means of encoding information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put target words either in wide, informational, or corrective focus, or in one of the experiments also in pre-focal or post-focal position rendering it as given. The prosodic parameters F0 and duration were measured on the target words. Duration is not consistently affected by information structure, but contrary to the prediction that High (H) and Low (L) tones are raised in ex situ (fronted) focus constructions we found a significantly lower realization of both H and L tones under corrective focus in ex situ and in situ focus constructions. Givenness does not seem to be marked prosodically. The data suggest that pragmatic prominence is expressed prosodically by means of a deviation from an unmarked prosodic structure. Results are thus contradicting the view of the effort code that predicts a positive correlation of more effort resulting in higher F0 targets.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{GenzelIshiharaSuranyi2015,
  author    = {Genzel, Susanne and Ishihara, Shinichiro and Suranyi, Balazs},
  title     = {The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian},
  series = {Lingua : international review of general linguistics},
  volume    = {165},
  journal   = {Lingua : international review of general linguistics},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0024-3841},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.010},
  pages     = {183 -- 204},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for and are also examined. The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions of focus and givenness. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{GenzelKuegler2018,
  author    = {Genzel, Susanne and K{\"u}gler, Frank},
  title     = {Production and perception of question prosody in Akan},
  series = {Journal of the International Phonetic Association},
  volume    = {50},
  journal   = {Journal of the International Phonetic Association},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Cambridge Univ. Press},
  address   = {Cambridge},
  issn      = {0025-1003},
  doi       = {10.1017/S0025100318000191},
  pages     = {61 -- 92},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {The paper presents a production experiment investigating the phonetic parameters speakers employ to differentiate Yes-No questions from string-identical statements in Akan, a West-African two-tone Kwa language. Results show that, in comparison to the statement, speakers use a higher pitch register throughout the utterance as a global parameter, and falling f0, longer duration and higher intensity as local parameters on the final syllable of the Yes-No question. Further, two perception experiments (forced-choice identification and gating) investigate the perceptual relevance of the global parameter and the local final parameters. Results show that listeners cannot assess the higher pitch register information to identify the mode of a sentence early on. Rather, identification takes place when the local phonetic parameters on the final vowel are available. The findings point to the superiority of language-specific cues in sentence mode perception. It is suggested that Akan uses a low boundary tone that associates with the right edge of the intonation phrase (L\%) in Yes-No questions. The results are discussed from the point of view of question intonation typology in African languages. It is argued that a classification along the lines of functionally relevant cues is preferable to an impressionistic analysis.},
  language  = {en}
}