Languages vary in how focus manifests prosodically. In English, focused words tend to be acoustically prominent, having longer duration and greater acoustic intensity than unfocused controls. The same is true for Mandarin Chinese, although the magnitude of these acoustic effects is smaller. Medumba, a Cameroonian Grassfields Bantu language, is one of several Niger-Congo languages showing patterns of stem-initial prominence, a phenomenon often accompanied by focus-related lengthening of stem-initial consonants. However, in other languages, focus may not manifest prosodically at all. Dangme, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, marks prominence with several syntactic particles which may not correspond to any prosodic changes. How these differences map to articulatory patterns requires further investigation. We conducted Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) studies of English, Mandarin, Medumba, and Dangme, with similar materials, manipulating focus. Preliminary results indicate that all languages have similar kinematics for individual consonant and vowel gestures but differ in how these gestures and the coordination between them is impacted by focus. Based on this data, we present a mini-typology of articulatory strategies that languages use to convey focus.
Amber et al. (Wed,) studied this question.