L'intonation montante en français spontané : Continuation vs. Question

Continuation statements and polar questions in conversational French are typically both produced with final rising intonation. This study shows that several pitch, duration, and intensity cues can distinguish the two utterance types over chance level. Nevertheless, we see a lot of phonetic overlap between the two. Rather than assuming two distinct rising intonation contour types for French, we propose that the variation in phonetic detail relates to interactional factors (e.g., turn-taking and speech-act type)

Local speech rate differences between questions and statements in Italian

International audienceIn this paper we address the issue of whether modality can be coded by cues other than pitch accent category in Neapolitan Italian. Specifically, our findings show that segmentally identical sentences uttered as either a yes/no question or a statement show different patterns of local speech rate. Specifically, while global utterance duration is the same in the two modalities, differences were found for individual phone duration, and mainly at utterance edges. These results are not compatible with a universal view of global rate differences between questions and statements and call for a more complex model of the interaction between segmental and suprasegmental contrast