ETRW on Dialogue and Prosody September 1-3, 1999 Veldhoven, The Netherlands

Phonetic Correlates of Sentence Type in Dutch: Statement, Question and Command

Vincent J. van Heuven (1), Judith Haan (2), Robert S. Kirsner (3)

(1) Phonetics Laboratory Leiden University and Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics, Leiden, The Netherlands
(2) Department of General Linguistics and Dialectology, Catholic University of Nijmegen The Netherlands
(3) Department of Germanic Languages, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

We present an overview of our recent work on the signalling of sentence type in Dutch both through lexico-syntactic structure and through intonation. Production data were studied in a controlled experiment with play-acted sentence types (statements, yes/no-questions, wh-questions and declarative questions (lexico-syntactically identical to statements)), and in unconstrained spontaneous dialog (doctor-patient interactions, Perception experiments were run to determine the effectivity of specific prosodic features in the signalling of statement versus question and of statement versus command using either natural gated or psola-manipulated human speech.

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Bibliographic reference.  Heuven, Vincent J. van / Haan, Judith / Kirsner, Robert S. (1999): "Phonetic correlates of sentence type in Dutch: Statement, question and command", In DIAPRO-1999, 35-40.