Fundamental frequency contours at syntactic boundaries.

Abstract

A series of experiments was conducted to determine the extent to which speakers’ syntactic coding influences fundamental frequency (F0) contours in the region of syntactic boundaries. F0 measurements were obtained for groups of nine and ten speakers by computer using a parallel processing algorithm. Measurements were obtained for key word segments at syntactic boundaries in sentences matched for surrounding phonetic environment and stress pattern. In experiment I, statistically significant fall–rise patterns of F0 were obtained at the boundaries between main conjoined clauses and at the boundaries between main and embedded clauses. The fall–rise pattern was somewhat more pronounced at the boundaries between two conjoined clauses. The results with main-embedded clause boundaries provided the basis for experiment II, in which contours were studied at the boundaries between main and embedded clauses for which the location of the boundaries is controversial on linguistic grounds. In experiment III, the study of fall–rise patterns was extended to major phrase boundaries in sentences having subject-verb-object word order and in sentences for which such order was violated by the fronting of a constituent to the beginning of the sentence. The results showed more pronounced postboundary rises in F0 after the fronted constituents. The results for experiments I and III suggested that the fall–rise patterns observed at clause and phrase boundaries typically represented local effects rather than the resetting of the speakers’ declination line. Finally, separate analyses of data for male and female speakers showed that F0 values for females were approximately 1.8 times those of males at each measured point in the F0 contours for all three experiments, suggesting the presence of a single male–female scaling factor for F0.