Acoustic Patterns and Communicative Functions of Phrase-Final F0 Rises in German: Activating and Restricting Contours

Vol. 62, No. 2-4, 2005

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Original Paper

Acoustic Patterns and Communicative Functions of Phrase-Final F0 Rises in German: Activating and Restricting Contours
E. Dombrowski, O. Niebuhr

^aInstitute of Psychology and
^b Institute of Phonetics and Digital Speech Processing(IPDS), Christian-Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany

Phonetica 2005;62:176-195 (DOI: 10.1159/000090097)

Abstract

Acoustic features and communicative functions of phrase-final F0 rises startingbefore an accented-vowel onset are analysed in a corpus of German unscriptedspeech. Two conversational conditions are examined: turn-yielding and turn-holding.The most important feature distinguishing rises in these two conditions is therange proportion, which differentiates between two patterns as follows: (1) raisedpitch on the accented syllable and restrained pitch movement in the tail of thecontour, (2) lowered pitch on the accented syllable and extended pitch movementin the tail. The first pattern is seen as a restrictivegesture, e.g. preventing the dia-loguepartner from turn taking. The second one is viewed as an activatinggesture,inviting the coparticipant to contribute.

Medline Abstract (ID 16391502)

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