An Empirical Investigation on the Perceptual Similarity of Prosodic Language Types

Abstract

This study explores whether prosodic similarities of typological prosodic language types can be perceived by German native speakers. For this purpose, two online perception experiments were conducted containing twelve typologically and geographically diverse languages. Participants were asked to judge their prosodic similarity. Results showed that languages with mainly word-level prosodic properties were judged as similar to one another, while languages employing sentence-level prosodic properties were not clearly perceived as similar to their specific language type. Frequent confusions of Intonation and Phrase languages indicate a high perceptional similarity of languages belonging to these prosodic types. This leads to the assumption that the adopted distinction of prosodic properties is not completely represented in perception. Rather, additional prosodic factors influence the perception of the sentence prosody of languages.