ISCA Archive DiaPro 1999
ISCA Archive DiaPro 1999

Phonetic correlates of sentence type in Dutch: Statement, question and command

Vincent J. van Heuven, Judith Haan, Robert S. Kirsner

We present an overview of our recent work on the signalling of sentence type in Dutch both through lexico-syntactic structure and through intonation. Production data were studied in a controlled experiment with play-acted sentence types (statements, yes/no-questions, wh-questions and declarative questions (lexico-syntactically identical to statements)), and in unconstrained spontaneous dialog (doctor-patient interactions, Perception experiments were run to determine the effectivity of specific prosodic features in the signalling of statement versus question and of statement versus command using either natural gated or psola-manipulated human speech.