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

The Communicative Effects of Rising and Falling Pitch Accents in British English and Dutch

Toni Rietveld (1), Carlos Gussenhoven (1), Anne Wichmann (2), Esther Grabe (3)

(1) Centre for Language Studies, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
(2) Department of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire, UK
(3) Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, UK

Phonologically identical intonation contours may differ in the way they are realised as well as in their relative frequency of occurrence in particular pragmatic and discoursal contexts. We report an experiment designed to test the informal observation that certain questions when realised with L*HH% will be perceived as ‘aggressive’ or ‘unfriendly’ by British English listeners, by Dutch listeners, when listening to utterances in their native language. By presenting intonationally manipulated speech in short dialogues we aimed to answer the question whether, and if so to what extent, the hypothesised differences between English and Dutch are reflected in listeners' judgements. The hypothesis was not confirmed by the data obtained in the perception experiment.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Rietveld, Toni / Gussenhoven, Carlos / Wichmann, Anne / Grabe, Esther (1999): "The communicative effects of rising and falling pitch accents in British English and Dutch", In DIAPRO-1999, 111-116.