Can the prosody of statements and various types of questions be identified in Gallo-Romance dialects?

Abstract

In the current study four types of speech acts in several Gallo-Romance dialects are examined: statements, polar questions, incredulous questions (expecting a negative response), and queries for confirmation (expecting a positive response). In a perception experiment we found that the first two types are generally reliably identified whereas for the latter two, only a limited number of utterances yielded recognition rates far above chance. We identified confusions mostly between polar and incredulous questions, as well as between the other two. When examining prosodic differences between the four classes that facilitated discrimination, we found that they mostly concerned the fundamental frequency ( F 0 ) contours, especially in the latter part of the utterances.