Intonational distinctions between sentence types in North Kyungsang Korean

Abstract

As a lexical pitch accent language, North Kyungsang Korean seems to display a very restricted distribution of intonation. This paper investigates intonational differences between statements and questions in North Kyungsang Korean. In particular, a variety of f0 targets are compared between the sentence types, including pitch accent f0 peak, utterance‐final edge, pitch range, and f0 valleys. Besides the acoustic analyses, perceptual identification tests are performed to test whether apparently diverging acoustic cues are perceptually significant. Based on ANOVA tests, it turns out that NK Korean questions can be significantly different from statements with respect to the utterance‐final edge f0 and the relative f0 and timing of the rightmost f0 valley. Specifically, questions have higher f0 values at the right edge and higher and earlier occurrences of the rightmost f0 valley. Further, the forced‐choice identification tests, whose input materials are manipulated in the similar set of acoustic variables, sh...