Phonetic realization of focus in Persian

Abstract

The present study investigates how focus is phonetically realized in declarative and interrogative sentences in Persian. Focus is usually interpreted as contrastive focus in this language. That is, the contrasted element is chosen out of a closed set of entities and bears heavy stress. In this study, 12 native speakers of Persian recorded short declarative and interrogative sentences including Clitic Group and Phonological Word in neutral and focal conditions. The results show small acoustic differences in duration, intensity and spectral information between initial and final accented target words in neutral and focus conditions in Persian, by the side of substantial differences in f0.