On the intonation of German intonation questions: the role of the prenuclear region

Utterance-Initial Prosodic Differences Between Statements and Questions in Infant-Directed Speech

Cross-linguistically, statements and questions broadly differ in syntactic organization. To learn the syntactic properties of each sentence type, learners might first rely on non-syntactic information. This paper analyzed prosodic differences between infant-directed wh-questions and statements to determine what kinds of cues might be available. We predicted there would be a significant difference depending on the first words that appear in wh-questions (e.g., two closed-class words; meaning words from a category that rarely changes) compared to the variety of first words found in statements. We measured F0, duration, and intensity of the first two words in statements and wh-questions in naturalistic speech from 13 mother-child dyads in the Brent corpus of the CHILDES database. Results found larger differences between sentence-types when the second word was an open-class not a closed-class word, suggesting a relationship between prosodic and syntactic information in an utterance-initial position that infants may use to make sentence-type distinctions.

Questioning questions - the perception of f0 scaling in German questions between categorical function and continuous attitude

In previous studies comparing the intonation of questions and statements in German, greater f0 excursions of phrase-final rises have been associated with questions in both read speech and spontaneous speech. This holds for production studies as well as perception studies. However, a major question remains whether these differences are perceived categorically or continuously. Furthermore, we ask whether the differences in f0 scaling correspond to categorical linguistic functions or rather an attitudinal continuum. We conducted three different perception experiments: a classical categorical perception task, an imitation task, and a semantic evaluation task. The results suggest that f0 scaling in phrase-final rises is perceived as a phonetic continuum rather than in phonological categories. Furthermore, the gradual increase of the final rise is associated with a gradual increase in perceived questioning. Lastly, the phonetic cues to this degree of questioning are distinct from those to the other investigated meanings surprise and uncertainty. Accordingly, this study supports the assumption that questioning constitutes an attitudinal meaning in its own right.

Individual Differences in Early Disambiguation of Prosodic Grouping

Prosodic cues help to disambiguate incoming information in spoken language perception. In structurally ambiguous coordinate utterances, such as three-name sequences, the intended grouping is marked by three prosodic cues: F0-range, final lengthening, and pause. To indicate that the first two names are grouped together, speakers typically weaken the durational and tonal cues on the first name whereas they are strengthened on the second name, compared with a structure without internal grouping. The current study uses a gating paradigm to test whether listeners can decide about the internal grouping of a coordinate structure by already exploiting prosodic information on the first name. One hundred ninety-two stimuli were cut into seven parts (gates) and presented to naive participants (n = 45) successively (gate by gate) with increasing length of the utterance and amount of prosodic information. In a two-alternative forced-choice decision task, accuracy was above chance level after the second name. However, more than half of the participants could already reliably detect grouping patterns after the first name. These interindividual differences point toward the existence of different subgroups with diverging prosodic parsing strategies. Furthermore, listeners were sensitive to speaker-specific prosodic patterns. Depending on speaker-specific characteristics and individual parsing capacities, it seems possible-at least for a subgroup of listeners-to make predictions about the underlying grouping structure of coordinated name sequences based on early prosodic cues.

The Prosody of Wh-exclamatives and Wh-questions in German: Speech Act Differences, Information Structure, and Sex of Speaker

The prosody of non-assertive speech acts other than questions is rather underexplored. Very little is known about the role of information structure in non-assertive speech acts in general. The present study presents two production experiments examining the prosody of string-identical verb-second (experiment 1) and verb-final (experiment 2) wh-exclamatives and wh-questions in German in relation to their status as different speech acts, in relation to their sensitivity to information structure, and in relation to speaker sex. The study shows that the two speech acts are differentiated by many prosodic means, both globally (duration, intonation contour) and locally (accent distribution in the clause-initial and clause-final regions; pitch, duration, intensity on various elements in the clause, especially the subject pronoun and the direct object, which are more prominent in exclamatives, and the verb-second auxiliary, which is more prominent in questions). Exclamatives overall show a very rigid prosodic contour; they typically are realized with an accent on the subject pronoun and on the object and end in a fall. Questions are much more flexible; they are realized as rises or falls, and show a more varied accent structure in the clause-initial and clause-final regions. Both speech acts show information-structural effects of givenness marking, but the effects in exclamatives are remarkably weak. It is proposed that the speech-act marking prosody overrides information-structural effects to some extent. Male and female speakers show differences in their preferred accent patterns for the two speech acts. Some acoustic differences are only reliable for female speakers.

The Prosody of Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions in German

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking questions (ISQs) in German for two question types-polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth "wh-questions"). The results are as follows: Phonologically, polar RQs were mainly realized with H-% (high plateau), while polar ISQs mostly ended in H-^H% (high-rise). Wh-RQs almost exclusively terminated in a low edge tone, whereas wh-ISQs allowed for more tonal variation (L-%, L-H%, H-^H%). Irrespective of question type, RQs were mainly produced with L*+H accents. Phonetically, RQs were more often realized with breathy voice quality than ISQs, in particular in the beginning of the interrogative. Furthermore, they were produced with longer constituent durations than ISQs, in particular at the end of the interrogative. While the difference between RQs and ISQs is reflected in the intonational terminus of the utterance, this does not happen in the way suggested in the semantic literature, and in addition, accent type and phonetic parameters also play a role. Crucially, a simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is insufficient to capture the realization of the different illocution types (RQs, ISQs), against frequent claims in the semantic and pragmatic literature. We suggest alternative ways to interpret the findings.

A Musical Approach to Speech Melody

We present here a musical approach to speech melody, one that takes advantage of the intervallic precision made possible with musical notation. Current phonetic and phonological approaches to speech melody either assign localized pitch targets that impoverish the acoustic details of the pitch contours and/or merely highlight a few salient points of pitch change, ignoring all the rest of the syllables. We present here an alternative model using musical notation, which has the advantage of representing the pitch of all syllables in a sentence as well as permitting a specification of the intervallic excursions among syllables and the potential for group averaging of pitch use across speakers. We tested the validity of this approach by recording native speakers of Canadian English reading unfamiliar test items aloud, spanning from single words to full sentences containing multiple intonational phrases. The fundamental-frequency trajectories of the recorded items were converted from hertz into semitones, averaged across speakers, and transcribed into musical scores of relative pitch. Doing so allowed us to quantify local and global pitch-changes associated with declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentences, and to explore the melodic dynamics of these sentence types. Our basic observation is that speech is atonal. The use of a musical score ultimately has the potential to combine speech rhythm and melody into a unified representation of speech prosody, an important analytical feature that is not found in any current linguistic approach to prosody.

Asking or Telling--Real-time Processing of Prosodically Distinguished Questions and Statements

We introduce a targeted language game approach using the visual world, eye-movement paradigm to assess when and how certain intonational contours affect the interpretation of utterances. We created a computer-based card game in which elliptical utterances such as "Got a candy" occurred with a nuclear contour most consistent with a yes-no question (H* H-H%) or a statement (L* L-L%). In Experiment I we explored how such contours are integrated online. In Experiment 2 we studied the expectations listeners have for how intonational contours signal intentions: do these reflect linguistic categories or rapid adaptation to the paradigm? Prosody had an immediate effect on interpretation, as indexed by the pattern and timing of fixations. Moreover, the association between different contours and intentions was quite robust in the absence of clear syntactic cues to sentence type, and was not due to rapid adaptation. Prosody had immediate effects on interpretation even though there was a construction-based bias to interpret "got a" as a question. Taken together, we believe this paradigm will provide further insights into how intonational contours and their phonetic realization interact with other cues to sentence type in online comprehension.

Gestural coordination at prosodic boundaries and its role for prosodic structure and speech planning processes

Prosodic structure is a grammatical component that serves multiple functions in the production, comprehension and acquisition of language. Prosodic boundaries are critical for the understanding of the nature of the prosodic structure of language, and important progress has been made in the past decades in illuminating their properties. We first review recent prosodic boundary research from the point of view of gestural coordination. We then go on to tie in this work to questions of speech planning and manual and head movement. We conclude with an outline of a new direction of research which is needed for a full understanding of prosodic boundaries and their role in the speech production process.

Production and perception of contrast: The case of the rise-fall contour in German

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fall contour. The acoustic analysis of these contours revealed a significant effect of contrastiveness on the height/alignment of the accent peak as a function of focus context. On the other hand, the height/alignment of the low turning point at the beginning of the rise did not show an effect of contrastiveness. In a series of semantic congruency perception tests participants judged the congruency of congruent and incongruent context-stimulus pairs based on three different sets of stimuli: (i) original data, (ii) manipulation of accent peak, and (iii) manipulation of the leading low. Listeners distinguished nuclear rise-fall contours as a function of focus context (Experiment 1 and 2), however not based on manipulations of the leading low (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the alignment and scaling of the accentual peak are sufficient to license a contrastive interpretation of a nuclear rise-fall contour, leaving the rising part as a phonetic onglide, or as a low tone that does not interact with the contrastivity of the context.