Tonal and syntactic correlates of focus perception in Greek and Russian

Abstract

The present paper reports on the way word order and tonal slope influence focus perception in Russian and Greek declaratives. Perception experiment was carried out in order to identify the impact falling tone slope and word order change have on focus identification. The speech material included manipulated stimuli with 5 and 3 different falling tone slopes for Russian and Greek respectively and involved 6 different word orders. The results of the perception test indicate that: (1) slope manipulation is a reliable focus indicator; (2) word order change is not sufficient for focus identification; (3) no major cross-language contrasts were observed.