Acoustic Correlates of Statement and Question Intonation in Southern Vietnamese

Abstract

This paper reports a study that investigated the acoustic correlates of the intonation patterns of statements versus various kinds of questions in Southern Vietnamese. Sentences identical in segmental make-up and lexical tone were elicited in nine different contexts: (1) statements, (2) Yes-No questions without particles, (3) Yes-No questions with the particle không, (4) questions with the particle ư (5) alternative questions with the particle hay ‘or’, (6 and 7) Wh-questions with the particles ai (who) and chừng nào ‘when’ at the beginning, and (8 and 9) Wh-questions with particles cho ai ‘for whom’ and hồi nào ‘when’ at the end. Twenty speakers (9 males and 11 females) from Hồ Chí Minh City participated in the study. The results show that there are a number of acoustic strategies for realizing the difference between declaratives and the interrogatives in Southern Vietnamese: global F0, speech tempo, intensity and local sentence-final F0. The results of this investigation contribute to the study of Vietnamese prosody, cross-language and cross-dialectal prosodic comparison.