A study of the perception of sentence intonation—Evidence from Danish

Ten subjects identified 15 Danish utterances by a human speaker, differing only in their fundamental frequency (F0) course, as being either declarative, nonfinal, or interrogative (forced choice). Responses are closely correlated with F0: the most steeply falling intonation contours are identified as being declarative, the least falling ones as being interrogative, and contours in the middle of the continuum as being nonfinal. Several mutually interdependent parameters in the F0 course may account for the results, the two most powerful one, however, being the levels of the last stressed and the succeeding unstressed syllable, respectively, in the utterance. In a subsequent experiment, seven subjects identified the same utterances as being either declarative or nondeclarative. The majority of the (formerly) nonfinal sentences were now labeled nondeclarative, rather than being equally distributed among the declarative and nondeclarative categories. When a subset of the same utterances were multilated, identification deteriorated almost progressively with the number of syllables being cut away from the end of the utterance, but only slightly so until nothing but the first stress group remained; whereas, syllables cut away from the beginning hardly affected identification at all.