SPoSS - Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech La Baume-les-Aix, France September 24-26, 1998

Global and Local Characteristics of Dutch Questions in Play-Acted and Spontaneous Speech

Vincent J. van Heuven (1), Judith Haan (2), Jos J. A. Pacilly (1)

(1) Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Linguistics and Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics, Leiden University, The Netherlands
(2) Department of General Linguistics and Dialectology, Centre for Language Studies, Nijmegen University, The Netherlands

This paper examines phonetic correlates of statements vs. three types of questions: yes/no-questions, wh-ques-tions and declarative questions. The first part of the paper deals with data collected in a formal production experiment. Intonation characteristics were determined once by hand, and once by the extraction of global Fo-measures (intercepts and slopes of regression lines drawn automatically through the upper and lower halves of the pitch curves of utterances). Results show that the regression parameters capture the essentials of the intonational characteristics of the four sentence types. A real-life dataset of authentic doctor-patient interactions was then collected and analysed using automatic parameter extraction only. We will examine to what extent the characteristics of the four sentence types are preserved in spontaneous speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Heuven, Vincent J. van / Haan, Judith / Pacilly, Jos J. A. (1998): "Global and local characteristics of Dutch questions in play-acted and spontaneous speech", In SPoSS-1998, 139-142.