A study of perception of sentence intonation--evidence from Danish. 1980

N G Thorsen

Ten subjects identified 15 Danish utterances by a human speaker, differing only in their fundamental frequency (F0) course, as being either declarative, nonfinal, or interrogative (forced choice). Responses are closely correlated with F0: the most steeply falling intonation contours are identified as being declarative, the least falling ones as being interrogative, and contours in the middle of the continuum as being nonfinal. Several mutually interdependent parameters in the F0 course may account for the results, the two most powerful one, however, being the levels of the last stressed and the succeeding unstressed syllable, respectively, in the utterance. In a subsequent experiment, seven subjects identified the same utterances as being either declarative or nondeclarative. The majority of the (formerly) nonfinal sentences were now labeled nondeclarative, rather than being equally distributed among the declarative and nondeclarative categories. When a subset of the same utterances were multilated, identification deteriorated almost progressively with the number of syllables being cut away from the end of the utterance, but only slightly so until nothing but the first stress group remained; whereas, syllables cut away from the beginning hardly affected identification at all.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D008037 Linguistics The science of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed) Linguistic
D010700 Phonetics The science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed) Speech Sounds,Sound, Speech,Sounds, Speech,Speech Sound
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D013061 Speech Acoustics The acoustic aspects of speech in terms of frequency, intensity, and time. Acoustics, Speech,Acoustic, Speech,Speech Acoustic
D013067 Speech Perception The process whereby an utterance is decoded into a representation in terms of linguistic units (sequences of phonetic segments which combine to form lexical and grammatical morphemes). Speech Discrimination,Discrimination, Speech,Perception, Speech

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