On the Intonation of German Intonation Questions: The Role of the Prenuclear Region

Abstract

German questions and statements are distinguished not only by lexical and syntactic but also by intonational means. This study revisits, for Northern Standard German, how questions are signalled intonationally in utterances that have neither lexical nor syntactic cues. Starting from natural productions of such 'intonation questions', two perception experiments were run. Experiment 1 is based on a gating paradigm, which was applied to naturally produced questions and statements. Experiment 11 includes two indirect-identification tasks. Resynthesized stimuli were judged in relation to two context utterances, each of which was compatible with only one sentence mode interpretation. Results show that utterances with a finally falling nuclear pitch-accent contour can also trigger question perception. An utterance-final rise is not mandatory. Also, question and statement cues are not restricted to the intonational nucleus. Rather, listeners can refer to shape, slope, and alignment differences of the preceding prenuclear pitch accent to identify sentence mode. These findings are in line with studies suggesting that the utterance-final rise versus fall contrast is not directly related to sentence modality, but represents a separate attitudinal meaning dimension. Moreover, the findings support that both prenuclear and nuclear fundamental frequency (F0) patterns must be taken into account in the analysis of tune meaning.

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

“…A similar interpretation of declination was reported by Thorsen (1980), who found that Danish listeners associated steeply falling sentence intonation with statements, and associated rising sentence intonation with questions. Pitch accents in the pre-nuclear region may also cue speech act types, as has been shown for Northern Standard German (Petrone & Niebuhr, 2014). In sum, listeners are sensitive to both local and global changes in the speaker's fundamental frequency as cues to speech acts, when asked to judge (parts of) utterances offline.…”

“…Previous research has found that the entire F0 contour can cue different speech acts, not just the nuclear portion (e.g., Petrone & Niebuhr, 2014;Van Heuven & Haan, 2002). Table 1 shows that there are indeed differences between the F0 trajectories in target statements and questions, and these differences are also visually represented in Figure 4.…”

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

“…[9,10]). The other view argues that pre-nuclear accents do contribute to the meaning of an utterance [11,12]. 2 Note that languages differ in how prosodic structure fulfills this function.…”

The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?

“…There are a number of studies which adopt the gating paradigm to investigate whether and how prosody guides identification of interrogatives as opposed to declaratives in Spanish, Neapolitan Italian, Northern Standard German, Dutch and French (Face 2005;Petrone and D'Imperio 2011;Petrone and Niebuhr 2014;Van Heuven and Haan 2000;Vion and Colas 2006). 4 All of these investigations focused on yes-no questions or declarative questions.…”