The non-lax question prosody of Akan

Abstract

The paper investigates the acoustics of the final vowel in string-identical Yes-No questions and statements in Akan, a Kwa languages classified as belonging to the group of lax prosody languages. Several spectral measures and measure of periodicity are presented. Results show that the final vowels of Yes-No questions are not characterized by lax laryngeal settings. The final vowel of Yes-No questions is produced with more speech effort due to an additional tonal target at the right edge of the question (L%). The question prosody of Akan thus exhibits non-lax characteristics.