Experiments on the meaning of four types of single-accent intonation patterns in Dutch.
The Grammar of Dutch Intonation (GDI) provides a description of the possible intonation contours of Dutch. The GDI distinguishes accent-lending and nonaccent-lending pitch configurations, but refrains from further functional statements. This paper describes an experimental attempt to verify meaning hypotheses for four Dutch single-accent pitch patterns as postulated in the linguistic literature. The four pitch accent types were realized on proper names; the abstract meanings, in terms of the manipulation of an element of the background shared between speaker and listener, were incorporated in situational contexts, distinguishing between a "default" and a vocative use of the proper name ("orientation"). Listeners ranked the four melodic shapes from most to least appropriate in their specific context. After revision of part of the materials a second perception experiment was conducted, in which subjects had a rank four contexts from most to least appropriate for a specific pitch accent type. Results show a distinct effect of "orientation" on the appropriateness of two of the investigated pitch accent types in the various context types; the other two pitch accent types are associated with the predicted context types (and vice versa) well above chance, indicating the viability of at least two of the linguistic proposals.
Caspers
J
J
Phonetics Laboratory/Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics, Leiden University, The Netherlands. caspers@rullet.leidenuniv.nl
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009426:Netherlands; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D010898:Pitch Perception; D012107:Research Design; D012660:Semantics