Skip to main content
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

At the Edge of Intonation: The Interplay of Utterance-Final F0 Movements and Voiceless Fricative Sounds

Published/Copyright: November 16, 2012
Phonetica
From the journal Phonetica Volume 69 Issue 1-2

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the ‘edge of intonation’ in a twofold sense. It focuses on utterance-final F0 movements and crosses the traditional segment-prosody divide by investigating the interplay of F0 and voiceless fricatives in speech production. An experiment was performed for German with four types of voiceless fricatives: /f/, /s/, /ʃ/ and /x/. They were elicited with scripted dialogues in the contexts of terminal falling statement and high rising question intonations. Acoustic analyses show that fricatives concluding the high rising question intonations had higher mean centres of gravity (CoGs), larger CoG ranges and higher noise energy levels than fricatives concluding the terminal falling statement intonations. The different spectral-energy patterns are suitable to induce percepts of a high ‘aperiodic pitch’ at the end of the questions and of a low ‘aperiodic pitch’ at the end of the statements. The results are discussed with regard to the possible existence of ‘segmental intonation’ and its implication for F0 truncation and the segment-prosody dichotomy, in which segments are the alleged troublemakers for the production and perception of intonation.

verified

*Oliver Niebuhr, Freyastrasse 10, DE–24939 Flensburg (Germany), E-Mail niebuhr@isfas.uni-kiel.de
Received: 2012-06-03
Accepted: 2012-09-02
Published Online: 2012-11-16
Published in Print: 2012-11-01

© 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Paper
  2. Title Page / Table of Contents
  3. Front and Back Matter
  4. Front & Back Matter
  5. Editorial
  6. Bridging the Segment-Prosody Divide in Speech Production and Perception
  7. Original Paper
  8. At the Edge of Intonation: The Interplay of Utterance-Final F0 Movements and Voiceless Fricative Sounds
  9. Intonation Adapts to Lexical Tone: The Case of Kammu
  10. Making Sense of Outliers
  11. The Perception of Lexical Stress in German: Effects of Segmental Duration and Vowel Quality in Different Prosodic Patterns
  12. Intelligibility of Non-Natively Produced Dutch Words: Interaction between Segmental and Suprasegmental Errors
  13. Further Section
  14. Index autorum
https://doi.org/10.1159/000343171

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Paper
  2. Title Page / Table of Contents
  3. Front and Back Matter
  4. Front & Back Matter
  5. Editorial
  6. Bridging the Segment-Prosody Divide in Speech Production and Perception
  7. Original Paper
  8. At the Edge of Intonation: The Interplay of Utterance-Final F0 Movements and Voiceless Fricative Sounds
  9. Intonation Adapts to Lexical Tone: The Case of Kammu
  10. Making Sense of Outliers
  11. The Perception of Lexical Stress in German: Effects of Segmental Duration and Vowel Quality in Different Prosodic Patterns
  12. Intelligibility of Non-Natively Produced Dutch Words: Interaction between Segmental and Suprasegmental Errors
  13. Further Section
  14. Index autorum
Downloaded on 26.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1159/000343171/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button