Phonetic cues to question intonation in Belfast English

This paper presents a perception experiment designed for Belfast English to discover whether listeners rely on pitch cues to differentiate declarative questions, that is, those with no lexical nor syntactic marker cue to their question status, from statements. Belfast English is characterized by a rising nuclear pattern in both statements and questions, and the experiment explores whether the height of the nuclear pitch peak and the size of the excursion of the nuclear rise relates to the perception of the utterance as a statement or a question. A series of context-free utterances with various pitch manipulations was presented to 30 listeners, and the results suggest that high peaks and large pitch excursions are strongly related to perception of the utterance as a question, irrespective of lexical and syntactic cues, and that low peaks and small excursions are related to perception of the utterance as a statement. Nonetheless, there is no distinct dividing line between the two. This observation contributes to discussions on Belfast English and Urban Northern British intonation, as well as of gradient and categorical perception and meaning in intonation, and offers additional evidence for the ‘myth’ of categorical perception.