Sentence intonation in spontaneous utterances and fluently spoken text

Abstract

What is the relationship between syntactic constituent structure and the intonation of a sentence? Psycholinguistic answers have varied, some viewing intonation as a close derivative of syntactic composition. The present study of this issue compared F0 and perceptual attributes of a number of syntactically and lexically identical sentence pairs. In each pair produced by a single talker, each sentence had the same pragmatic, thematic, and semantic function within a larger monologue of at least 40‐s duration, but one member had been produced spontaneously, and the other was read from a text prepared from the spontaneous corpus. Our linguistic results of the comparison of two kinds of fluent speech are discussed in terms of intonation in reading and spontaneous speech, as well as in terms of the phonological control of intonation. Our perceptual results are discussed with respect to the listener's sensitivity to the spontaneous/read distinction, and the implications for the potential contribution of intonation to sentence perception.