There is a group of wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives in Hungarian that are distinguished only by means of prosody. It was shown previously that the distinction consists in having falling pitch accents on the wh-element in interrogatives, and rising pitch accents in exclamatives. In this paper, the relevance of sentence-initial f0 is investigated as a potential trigger for the above differences. A perception experiment was set up in which sentence-initial and sentence-final chunks containing only f0 information were presented to participants, along with the wh-element bearing the only pitch accent of the sentence. It was shown that sentence-initial chunks carried the most relevant information for sentence type identification, whereas pitch accent type and entence-final f0 were less informative. The findings suggest that phrase-initial boundary tones are of relevance in Hungarian prosody
