Segmental intonation in Zwara Berber voiceless stressed syllable peaks

Abstract

Zwara Berber has regular word stress on the penultimate syllable. Syllable peaks may contain any vowel or consonant. When voiceless fricatives or plosives fill the peaks of stressed syllables, the f0 profile of the pitch accent associated with the stressed syllable is interrupted by that voiceless portion of the speech signal. The interruption may continue into the next syllable onset, which frequently happens when voiceless geminates straddle the rime-onset boundary. In order to establish whether missing f0 profiles affect friction and burst spectra, a male speaker recorded a corpus of 9 words with voiceless fricatives and 4 words with voiceless plosives in four intonation conditions four times. Plosive bursts and three one-third portions of friction intervals were judged for friction pitch in an AX-experiment whereby the pitch of the voiceless friction of X was to be judged relative to A on a 7-point scale. Pilot scores with 6 participants show that (i) the same segments have similar pitch profiles in different words; (ii) questions have higher pitch profiles than statements, replicating results with CoG measurements for a different language and a different context; (iii) friction pitch profiles do not mrror missing f0-movements. We conclude that the speaker controlled the spectral properties of friction and bursts only to reflect the declarative-interrogative contrast. Pitch judgements correlate moderately to well with intensity, CoG and spectral peak.