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

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Abstract
Ten subjects identified 15 Danish utterances by a human speaker, differing only in their fundamental frequency (Fo) course, as declarative, nonfinal or interrogative (forced choice). Responses are closely correlated with Fo: the most steeply falling intonation contours are identified as declarative, the least falling ones as interrogative and contours in the middle of the continuum as nonfinal. Several mutually interdependent parameters in the Fo course are possible. The 2 most powerful are the levels of the last stressed and the succeeding unstressed syllable, respectively, in the utterance. Subject [7] identified the same utterances as declarative or nondeclarative. The majority of the (formerly) nonfinal sentences were labeled nondeclarative, rather than equally distributed among the declarative and nondeclarative categories. When a subset of the same utterances were mutilated, identification deteriorated almost progressively with the number of syllables cut away from the end of the utterance, but only slightly so until nothing but the 1st stress group remained; syllables cut away from the beginning hardly affected identification at all.

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