Previous research has revealed that English speakers can differentiate between questions and statements after hearing an utterance's first pitch accent [1]. This suggests that initial F0 cues distinguishing questions from statements are present in the input. We examined this proposal by analyzing the first pitch accent in statements, absolute yes/no questions, and declarative questions. The production of these three sentence types was elicited from 10 Canadian English speakers who performed a sentence-repetition task. Results revealed that statements were produced with an initial H*, whereas both question types were almost exclusively produced with an initial L*+H. Statements were also produced with an earlier peak alignment, and a smaller F0 change. No differences were observed between absolute and declarative questions. The results are consistent with the stimuli analyzed in [1], and provide further evidence that initial pitch cues mark sentence type in Canadian English.
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