Are you asking me, telling me, or talking to yourself?

Abstract

The present study extends earlier work (Studdert-Kennedy & Hadding, 1972) by asking listeners to separate various fundamental frequency contours into three categories rather than two. Its purpose was to establish the perceptual validity and linguistic function of the third category. The fundamental frequency of a 700 ms vocoded utterance, November [no′vεmbər], was systematically varied to produce 72 contours differing in f0 at the stress and over the terminal glide. The contours were recorded (1) carried on the speech wave and (2) as frequency modulated sine waves. Twenty-two Swedish subjects classified (1) both speech and sine wave contours as terminally rising, falling, or level (psychological judgments), and (2) speech contours as those of a speaker addressing a question to a listener, making a statement to a listener, or talking to himself (linguistic judgments). The results show that listeners can, with some reliability, separate terminally level from terminally rising or falling contours. If, further, the level terminal glide is combined with an even, low to moderate pitch over earlier sections of the contour, listeners tend to judge the utterance as that of a speaker talking to himself. A new prosodic feature[± Listener] implemented by variations in fundamental frequency is proposed.