Perceptual correlates of sentence-type intonation in Russian and Japanese

Journal of Phonetics (2001) 29, 137}154 doi:10.006/jpho.2001.0137 Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Perceptual correlates of sentence-type intonation in Russian and Japanese Veronika Makarova Meikai University, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan Received 1st September 1998, and accepted 26th September 2000

This study identi"es commonalities in intonation perception by speakers of languages with di!erent prosodic structures. Results are presented from a perceptual experiment in which Japanese and Russian subjects identi"ed two-syllable re-synthesized stimuli with modi"ed rising}falling contours as exclamations, interrogatives or declaratives. The study compares perception by both groups of subjects and identi"es changes in manipulated parameters which a!ect listeners' perception. The results demonstrate that the perception of stimuli as declarative is similar for both groups of subjects, while the perception of stimuli as interrogative and exclamatory is in some cases signi"cantly di!erent. The increase in the height or magnitude of a rise leads to a decrease in the perception of stimuli as declarative by both groups of listeners. Stimuli with a rise of over 5.2 st do not elicit declarative judgements. Changes in pitch peak height, magnitude of a rise, and the magnitude of a fall have a more complex impact on subjects' perception of stimuli.  2001 Academic Press

1. Introduction Prosodic features of duration, intensity and pitch are employed in many languages to transform nominative linguistic entities (like words) into communicative entities (utterances) by organizing words into phrases, sentences and texts, by expressing the hierarchy of syntactical and semantic relationships within and between these units, as well as by expressing discoursal, communicative and a!ective meaning. Intonation has been shown to contribute to the production and perception of sentencetype contrasts, in particular, to the di!erentiation between a statement and a yes/no question in many languages (Hadding-Koch & Studdert-Kennedy, 1964; Bolinger, 1978; Gosy & Terken, 1994; Miura & Hara, 1995; Cruttenden, 1997; Haan, van Heuven, Pacilly & van Bezooijen, 1997; van Heuven, Haan, Janse & van der Torre, 1997). These studies demonstrate that in contrast to statements, yes/no questions tend to be associated with raised pitch (Ladd, 1996; Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998). In studies of sentence-type intonation contrasts, less attention has been given so far to exclamations, possibly because the status of exclamations as a linguistic category is not clearly determined. 0095}4470/01/020137#18 $35.00/0

 2001 Academic Press

138

<. Makarova

Most functional classi"cations of sentences include statements, questions and exclamations (also sometimes referred to as exclamatives or exclamatories), among the basic sentence types found in nearly all of the world's languages (Levinson, 1983; Crystal, 1997). A statement (or declarative*the two terms are used interchangeably in this study) is a sentence type which is used to convey information (Crystal, 1997). Questions (or interrogatives*terms also used interchangeably in this study) are used to elicit information or a response, whereby &&yes/no'' questions elicit a &&yes'' or &&no'' type of answer (Crystal, 1997). However, available de"nitions of exclamations are confusing. For example, Radford (1997, p. 506) calls exclamations &&a type of structure used to exclaim surprise, delight, annoyance, etc''. Levinson (1983, p. 42) de"nes exclamatives as a sentence type &&used paradigmatically to express surprise''. Halliday (1967) considers exclamations to be one of the major contextual sentence functions along with the categories of &&statement'', &&question'', &&command'', and &&answer''. In his system, exclamations are part of a grammatical classi"cation of sentences, and they are therefore distinct from imperatives, the latter forming part of a pragmatic classi"cation of utterances by &&mood'' along with a$rmative, interrogative and moodless utterances. Contrary to de"nitions claiming that exclamations form a grammatical structure of their own, Crystal believes that an exclamation is &&any emotional utterance, lacking the grammatical structure of a full sentence, and characterised by strong intonation'' (Crystal, 1997, p. 142). Some authors prefer to operate with the notion of &&extra emphatic intonation'' or &&extra emphatic accent'' rather than exclamatory intonation (e.g., Hojo, 1973; Ladd, 1996). These di!erences in interpretation may be caused by di!erences in the status of exclamations across languages. In this paper, exclamations are de"ned as a type of sentence structure which is used for the linguistic expression of emotions and attitudes and is characterized by distinctive intonation patterns. Exclamations can have either a distinctive grammatical pattern (for example, in English and Russian, exclamations can be formed with the help of sentenceinitial wh-exclamatory words) or can have a structure overlapping with other sentence types (including ellipsis). 1.1. Earlier cross-linguistic studies of intonation perception Although previous research has dealt with cross-linguistic comparisons of sentencetype intonation, such studies have mostly addressed related languages, like Dutch and Danish (e.g., Gooskens & van Heuven, 1995). Few studies have compared the perception of prosodic contrasts by speakers of languages with radically di!erent prosodic systems, even though comparisons of this sort could contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic mechanisms of intonation perception. For example, a study of tone perception by speakers of Chinese and American English (Repp & Lin, 1990) suggests the existence of language-independent features in the perception of prosody. No studies of sentence-type perception by Japanese and Russian subjects have been conducted so far and no cross-linguistic studies of sentence-type perception have included exclamations. 1.2. ¹he present study This study attempts to determine to what extent changes in intonation parameters are related to changes in sentence-type perception (declarative/interrogative/exclamatory)

Sentence-type intonation perception

139

for speakers of unrelated languages with di!erent prosodic systems (Japanese and Russian). The perception of subtle intonation contrasts is investigated under the condition of an extremely limited amount of prosodic information: two-syllable one-word utterances with a rise}fall pitch pattern. Employing perceptual stimuli of this sort did not enable the investigation of some intonational characteristics, such as di!erences in the F  downtrend/uptrend which have been found to contribute to disambiguation of sentencetype in longer utterances in a few languages including Japanese and Russian (Thorsen, 1980; Svetozarova, 1982; Kubozono, 1993; Haan et al., 1997). However, the stimuli in this experiment are pared down to a bare minimum of two syllables since it has been suggested earlier that &&F in the last stressed and post-tonic vowels are independent  parameters carrying information about the contour'' and enable the speakers to identify a sentence type (Thorsen, 1980, p. 1028). Listeners' reactions to the change of intonation parameters in these two syllables were investigated on the understanding that &&the "nal pitch movement following the nucleus is the most important pitch movement in an intonation group, and that on this basis one may make2valuable functional generalisations'' (Cruttenden, 1997, p. 149). Japanese and Russian have typologically di!erent prosodic systems. Although the traditional notions of stress- and syllable-timing have been questioned (Dauer, 1983; Eriksson, 1991), for convenience, in this study, these terms are used to characterize the di!erence between the two languages. Japanese has traditionally been described as pitchaccented and mora-timed (Kubozono, 1993; Cruttenden, 1997), while Russian is an intonation, stress-timed (stress-accented) language (Svetozarova, 1982; Cruttenden, 1997; Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998). Both languages have been claimed to use intonation to distinguish between declaratives, interrogatives and exclamations, as well as to employ varieties of a rise}fall tune in all three sentence types. However, the sentence-disambiguating function of intonation is di!erent across the two languages. Established facts about sentence-type intonation in both languages which are pertinent to this study are now reviewed. 1.3. Sentence-type intonation in Russian Sentence-type intonational contrasts play an important role in the production and comprehension of spoken Russian due to its free order of words, complexity of syntax and rare use of lexical or grammatical markers of sentence type (Svetozarova, 1998). The use of intonation to distinguish sentence types is of particular signi"cance in the theory of Russian intonation, since classi"cations of Russian intonation are largely based on sentence-type distinctions. Many descriptions of Russian intonation are centered around grammatical or communicative sentence types and operate with such notions as &&interrogative'', &&exclamatory'', &&enumerative'' intonation (Torsueva, 1974; Vsevolodskij- Gerngross, 1922). Other approaches to Russian intonation de"ne a set of intonation contours with distinctive meanings (Bryzgunova, 1963, 1983), whereby an ability to express di!erent sentence types is one of the most important aspects of meaningful contrast. Thus, descriptions of Russian intonation typically distinguish between intonation patterns of statements, general questions, and exclamations. Statements in Russian are described as having a phonologically falling tone. The fall starts on the tonic syllable, but can also be preceded by a rise on the pretonic syllable as well as by a rise in the onset of the tonic syllable (Svetozarova, 1982). The phonological fall in statements can therefore have a phonetic rise}fall pitch pattern.

140

<. Makarova

Yes/no questions in Russian normally have a direct word order (the same as in a statement) and bear no lexical or grammatical markers of sentence type. While it is true that interrogative particles may be used in Russian with general questions (Cruttenden, 1997), this happens very rarely, and such interrogatives have either special attitudinal or modal meanings. Intonation in Russian is therefore not an &&alternative option'' (Cruttenden, 1997, p. 156), but the major way of marking yes/no questions. The situation with yes/no questions in Russian is thus di!erent from many other languages where questions with a direct word order are less common or are posed for con"rmation (i.e., eliciting a &&yes'' rather than a &&yes/no'' response). Yes/no questions in Russian have a terminal rise in the accented syllable if the accented syllable is phrase-"nal. If any unstressed syllables follow, they are pronounced with a fall, the pitch movement thus becomes a rise}fall (Bryzgunova, 1963; Svetozarova, 1982). The same pattern is found in elliptical questions and echoes. The pattern is described phonologically as a rise or a rise}fall. Although variability can be found in the production of exclamations, particularly as a function of speaker a!ect, descriptions of Russian intonation deal with &&generalized exclamatory intonation'' which is contrasted with &&neutral declarative intonation'' and &&emphatic declarative intonation'' (Svetozarova, 1982). Russian speakers have no di$culties producing the "rst of these if they are requested to &&exclaim'' a particular phrase, or read a sentence with an exclamation mark. Exclamations in Russian occasionally have lexical markers of sentence type (exclamatory wh-pronoun in the beginning of the sentence), and are then pronounced with a truncated rise}fall (Bryzgunova, 1963, 1983). However, more commonly, exclamations without lexical markers of sentence type are characterized phonetically in Russian by a rise}fall contour resembling the one in declaratives but with a more pronounced rising movement (Svetozarova, 1982). Phonologically they are described as having a falling contour. 1.4. Sentence-type intonation in Japanese In contrast to abundant descriptions of sentence-type intonation in Russian, accounts of Japanese suprasegmentals tend to focus on word and compound word prosody: prosodic correlates of accent, accent assignment rules, moras, etc. (e.g., Haraguchi, 1977; Vance, 1987; Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988). In recent years researchers have shown greater interest in studying the behavior of word accents in a sentence perspective (Kubozono, 1993). However, studies of the latter kind have been centered mostly on declination and the spreading of the accentual fall over postaccented moras (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Kubozono, 1993). A further factor which may explain why sentence-type intonation in Japanese has been investigated relatively little is the fact that it has often been claimed that Japanese word accent patterns are not modi"ed by postlexical rules (Kubozono, 1993). However, there also exists counterevidence according to which phrasal prosody does interact with lexical pitch accents in a variety of ways (Abe, 1972, 1998; Hojo, 1973), which adds a layer of complexity to the description of intonation (Shibatani, 1990), and which suggests that there may well be value in studying intonation variability as a function of sentence type. Three major types of sentence intonation pattern in Japanese are typically described by researchers: declarative, interrogative and imperative. The inventory of other sentence types and sentence intonation patterns varies strongly across researchers.

Sentence-type intonation perception

141

Declaratives are characterized overall by a falling pattern (Fujisaki & Hirose, 1982, 1984). However, rise}fall patterns often occur in relatively long utterances where a sentence-initial boost is followed by a terminal fall (Abe, 1998), or in short, one-word utterances, where the realization of word-accent in combination with a falling terminal pitch leads to an overall rise-falling shape (Kubozono, 1993). In Japanese both yes/no and &&special'' questions can be made with or without a sentence-"nal interrogative particle &&ka''. Both types of question typically have a rising terminal (Abe, 1998). Rise}fall questions are found in conversational Japanese as short elliptical echoes/con"rmation questions. They may have a note of surprise/disbelief (Hojo, 1973). Although this type of pitch pattern has not been substantially described before, examples of rise}fall questions were obtained from a speaker of standard Japanese in earlier experiments (Makarova & Matsui, 1996, 1998). Exclamatory intonation in Japanese is sometimes referred to as &&extra emphatic'' intonation. It is reportedly characterized by a sharp pitch peak with a rise on the tonic and fall on posttonic syllables (Hojo, 1973). Abe (1998) claims that it is impossible to describe in full detail patterns other than declarative or interrogative on the grounds that &&Japanese is shackled with syntactical and lexical devices in addition to prosodic ones''. Although Abe does not talk separately of exclamatory intonation he gives an example of an exclamatory sentence and describes it as having a rise}fall pitch pattern distinct from the one found either in a statement or in a question (Abe, 1998, p. 367). To summarize the di!erences in sentence-type intonation in the two languages, while the three sentence types can be produced with a rise}fall pitch pattern in Japanese and Russian, the functional load of the contours is di!erent across the languages particularly in the case of rise}fall interrogatives. In Russian yes/no questions and echoes are usually associated with a rise}fall, or with a rise when the accented syllable is phrase-"nal whereas in Japanese a rising contour is more typical for interrogatives, and a rise}fall is less frequent, found mainly in echoes. Rise}fall interrogatives in Japanese convey a note of surprise/disbelief which moves the semantics of this question type closer to an exclamation. The aim of this study is to investigate if and how the di!erences in the functional load of the rise}fall in the three sentence types in Japanese and Russian may in#uence listeners' perception. Since it has been shown that subjects are more sensitive to variations and modi"cations of the tonal movement to which they are more frequently exposed (Verhoeven, 1994), it was hypothesized that there would be di!erences in the reaction of Japanese and Russian subjects to modi"cations of the rise}falls. 1.5. Perception of sentence-type intonation contrasts by speakers of Russian and Japanese As pointed out above, Russian sentences typically bear no lexical or grammatical markers of sentence types. Speakers of Russian therefore have to rely routinely on intonation cues for sentence-type disambiguation. Di!erent phonetic varieties of rise}fall movements (depending on the excursion, timing, slope and pitch height of the posttonic part) were found to be distinguished by Russian subjects by OdeH (1989), who, unfortunately, did not address the meaning and usage of the pitch movements. Russian speakers can successfully rely on variability in rise}fall realization to di!erentiate between sentence types even in four-syllable sentences (Svetozarova, 1982). It is unclear, however, which intonation parameters help Russian listeners to achieve this sentence disambiguation task even in conditions of minimal prosodic information.

142

<. Makarova

Although formal Japanese requires lexical and grammatical markers of sentence type, colloquial Japanese has a high frequency of ellipsis and the resulting grammatical forms of di!erent sentence types may therefore overlap (Shibatani, 1990). It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that intonation cues have come to be used for sentence-type disambiguation in colloquial Japanese. While this usage has received very little investigation to date (Miura & Hara, 1995), it has been shown that a rising pitch can be a su$cient cue for the perception of Japanese interrogatives (Miura & Hara, 1995). The question arises whether variations of another pitch contour (rise}fall) can also lead to changes in sentence-type perception. The experiment reported in this paper is based on a previous pilot comparison of the perceptual strategies adopted by Japanese and Russian listeners (Makarova & Matsui, 1996, 1998; Matsui & Makarova, 1997). A brief summary of these earlier results is as follows. The earlier experiment was conducted with natural two- and three-syllable utterances with a rise}fall pitch pattern. A list of 24 two-syllable and 13 three-syllable words was compiled by selecting the best matches for vowel and consonant type between the languages as well as by matching the accentual type (accent/stress on the penultimate syllable). Each word was read separately as a statement, question and an exclamation by one male speaker of standard Japanese and one male speaker of standard Russian. The analysis of intonation parameters of the data (using a Kay Elemetrics Visipitch 6095/6097) demonstrated that statements had lower pitch peaks than other sentence types for both speakers. Questions and exclamations had pitch peaks of similar heights, but di!ered in total duration as well as in the duration/velocity of rise and fall movements. Russian questions were shorter and had a steeper fall than exclamations, while Japanese questions were longer and had falls of steeper gradient than exclamations. The one-word utterances in the original recording were edited into four randomized sets of stimuli (separately for each language and syllable number) for a perceptual experiment in the course of which 21 Russian and 63 Japanese subjects identi"ed the sentence type by making a forced choice between a statement, question and exclamation. The results of the perception experiment indicated that Russian and Japanese listeners had a high percentage of correct recognition of declaratives while listening to their native and foreign language stimuli. This fact can be explained by the above-mentioned distinctive di!erence in the intonation parameters of declaratives as compared to interrogatives and exclamations. Russian subjects had a high percentage of correct identi"cation of the other two sentence types in their own language, but they misconstrued Japanese questions as exclamations, and Japanese exclamations as questions. The latter fact can be explained by the parametric di!erences between Russian and Japanese speakers' contours described above. Japanese subjects failed to clearly di!erentiate between exclamations and questions in their native language, and tended to misconstrue both sentence types as statements in the Russian material. The di!erence in the subjects' performance was interpreted as corresponding to the di!erence in their linguistic expectations resulting from the functions of rise}fall interrogatives in their native languages (see Sections 1.3/1.4 above). Intonation parameters which appeared to have the highest correlation with listeners' perception of sentence type were maximum F , F range, and the magnitude and velocity of the rise. The magnitude   of the fall was important for Japanese listeners, but of little importance for Russian listeners. Pitch height at the end of the fall was insigni"cant for both subject groups. The above experiment, however, was limited by the parameters of real-speech stimuli, which did not allow a reliable comparison of factors responsible for listeners' perception.

Sentence-type intonation perception

143

The present experiment was therefore conducted employing resynthesized contours with intonation parameters modi"ed along a continual grid. It was designed to establish the impact of variation in intonation parameters on listeners' perception of sentence type and to compare the perceptual strategies of Japanese and Russian subjects. 2. Materials and methods 2.1. Manipulated contour characteristics An interrogative [tata] produced by a male Japanese speaker (age 32) was chosen as the basis for manipulation. The word means &&much'' in Japanese and is a diminutive form of a common female name in Russian. The word provided convenient material for manipulation since it was shown in the previous set of experiments (Makarova & Matsui, 1996, 1998; Matsui & Makarova, 1997) that its declarative, interrogative and exclamatory variants in both languages all had a rise in the vowel of the "rst (accented) syllable, and a fall in the vowel of the postaccented syllable. Furthermore, compared to the declarative or exclamation, the vowel quality of the interrogative was particularly amenable to synthetic compression/extension. In preparing the stimuli, the original vowel formant values were preserved, while F  was modi"ed. Manipulations were made of pitch magnitude (de"ned as the size of the excursion made by a rise or fall) and of pitch height by changing the height of F at onset  and/or o!set, and subsequent logarithmic smoothing of the pitch values in the numeric "le. All stimuli had constant segment durations except stimuli in Series 6 in which the duration of the "rst and second syllables varied. The durations of segments were: [t]*97 ms, [a]*55 ms, [t]*145 ms, [a]*115 ms. One of the following parameters in each series of stimuli was manipulated: (i) the magnitude of the pitch rise in semitones (st) (Series 1), (ii) the height of a steep rise of 4.2 st (Series 2), (iii) the height of a gradual rise of 0.5 st (Series 3), (iv) pitch height at fall o!set (Series 4), (v) pitch height at fall onset (Series 5), (vi) vowel duration in the "rst and second syllables (Series 6). All manipulations of pitch height and magnitude were carried out in 2 st steps. Pitch distance in semitones is believed to be more relevant for listeners' perception than absolute pitch in Hz (Nooteboom, 1997). Pitch di!erences of over 1.5 st create reliable di!erences in perception (Rietveld & Gussenhoven, 1985) and the semitone scale has been widely used as a psychophysically relevant scale (e.g., &t Hart, Collier & Cohen, 1990). The choice of manipulations was determined by parameters that were found to be salient in the previous natural speech experiment. The choice of the exact values for resynthesized stimuli and the number of stimuli in each series was determined by the original parameter values of real-speech contours, technical limitations, as well as by the necessity to reach a compromise between what would sound natural and acceptable for speakers of the two languages. A pilot experiment was run to test whether all the stimuli were perceived by "ve speakers each of Japanese and Russian (who did not take part in the main experiment) as natural for the word &&tata'', and to have been produced by a human subject. The stimuli which did not satisfy either condition were excluded from the experiment, which led to di!erent numbers of stimuli in di!erent series. Figure 1, panels (a)}(e), show the manipulated F contours in Series 1}5. The  parameters of the fall in the second syllable in Series 1}3 were constant whereas the

144

<. Makarova

parameters of the rise were manipulated. The opposite was done in Series 4 and 5 where the parameters of the fall were manipulated. Series 6 cannot be represented concisely in graphical form. It contained stimuli with manipulated duration, but constant magnitude for the rise (3.5 st) and the fall (5.5 st). Nine combinations of the following three durations were obtained: &&short'' rise of 55 ms, &&medium'' rise of 90 ms, &&long'' rise of 135 ms; &&short'' fall of 60 ms, &&medium'' fall of

Figure 1. (a) Manipulated parameters in Series 1. Varied pitch peak and magnitude of the rise. (b) Manipulated parameters in Series 2. Varied height of a 4.2 st rise. (c) Manipulated parameters in Series 3. Varied height of a 0.5 st rise. (d) Manipulated parameters in Series 4. (e) Manipulated parameters in Series 5. Varied height of the fall end.

Sentence-type intonation perception

145

120 ms, and &&long'' fall of 180 ms. Series 6 included the following stimuli: short#short, medium#short, long#short, short#medium, medium#medium, long#medium, short#long, medium#long, long#long. The manipulation and re-synthesis of stimuli were carried out on a Kay Elemetrics CSL 4300 (in the LPC analysis/re-synthesis mode with "lter order set at 16, a sampling rate of 16 kHz, and a frequency bandwidth of approximately 6 kHz). 2.2. Subjects and procedure Forty Russian and 39 Japanese undergraduate students aged from 18 to 23 took part in the experiment. All the subjects were native speakers of Russian (standard St. Petersburg) and Japanese (standard Kanto). No subjects reported a history of hearing disorders. The subjects were asked to identify each stimulus as an exclamation, interrogative or declarative (a forced choice), and to indicate their decision by circling the corresponding word in the answer sheet. The stimuli were presented over headphones in language laboratories in a Japanese and Russian university. Each stimulus was presented three times with intervals of about 2 s between presentations of the same stimuli, and a longer interval of about 4 s between separate stimuli. The stimuli were presented in sequence from the stimulus with lowest manipulated pitch variable to that with the highest across all the Series 1}5, and in the order of description given above for Series 6. The experiment aimed to "nd whether the subjects can associate manipulations of a rise}fall contour with sentence-type distinctions, whether a particular point exists when a gradual change in the manipulated parameter might cause a change in subjects' perception of the sentence type, and whether this point is the same or di!erent across the wo groups of listeners. For this reason an ordered rather than randomized presentation of stimuli was chosen. In this regard, it is also relevant to note that a pilot experiment showed that a random presentation of stimuli confused listeners; they were more con"dent and comfortable working with a non-random gradually changing set of stimuli. Note too that the multiple presentation of stimuli required with randomization would have extended the duration of the task beyond the tolerance limit of the subjects (the task was monotonous since the subjects had to listen to minimally prosodically variable tokens of the same one-word stimulus). Of course, the exact point of a change in listeners' judgement may well be a!ected by the order of stimuli presentation, and an appropriate caveat is called for. It should also be noted that the experimental conditions were highly constrained (a two-syllable speech token, re-synthesized utterances, ordered presentation) and caution is required in extrapolating from the present results to natural speech perception. 2.3. Analysis The absolute and percent identi"cation rates of each stimulus as a declarative, interrogative, or exclamation were calculated for the two groups of subjects. A chi-square test was used to determine "rstly, the signi"cance of the di!erence in each stimulus identi"cation between the two groups of listeners. Two more tests were conducted to check if identi"cation of all stimuli in each series as well as identi"cation of stimuli as belonging to every sentence type were signi"cantly di!erent across the subject groups. Only signi"cant di!erences (at p(0.05) are further indicated in the description of results, and

146

<. Makarova

the cases where di!erences were non-signi"cant are not discussed further. All the results were pooled across the subjects within each of the two groups.

3. Results Figure 2 presents the percentage of stimuli identi"ed as statement, question, and exclamation broken down by listener's language (Japanese vs. Russian) in experimental Series 1}6, respectively. In the "rst instance, it should be mentioned that overall identi"cation rates were not as high as might be expected. Declarative judgements ranged from 2 to 72% for the Russians and from 0 to 90% for the Japanese subjects, interrogatives*from 10 to 70% and from 5 to 64%, respectively, while exclamatory judgements ranged from 2 to 72% of listeners' responses. Identi"cation rates could perhaps not be expected to rise higher (up to 100%, for example) because of the nature of stimuli. The stimuli contained very little prosodic information (2 syllables), and no lexical or syntactical &&hints'' of the sentence type; the stimuli were not obtained by resynthesis of real-speech utterances, but were arti"cially constructed by systematic parameter modi"cation of a single rise}fall contour. Sentencetype identi"cation of short utterances without lexical or grammar-syntactical markers with di+erent contours in Russian has earlier been shown to be on average 84%, and of resynthesized utterances (retaining the exact parameters of the original speech sentences, not quasi-speech as in this experiment)*74% (Svetozarova, 1982). Although the listeners in this experiment proved to be able to associate changes in the parameter values of a rise}fall pitch movement with certain sentence-types, the identi"cation was naturally less certain than in the experiment referred to above. In the present experiment an identi"cation rate of 70% or higher is therefore considered to be an indicator of a clear categorization of a stimulus as one of the three sentence-types. 3.1. Series 1 (varying magnitude of the rise in the ,rst syllable) For both groups of listeners the percentage of stimuli perceived as declarative decreases with an increase in the magnitude of the rise (see Fig. 2). Stimuli 1 and 2 (1.2 and 3.2 st rise) are predominantly identi"ed as declaratives. Stimulus 3 (5.2 st rise) is still perceived largely as a declarative, although with less certainty. There is a common threshold in the perception of both groups of listeners at stimulus 4 (7.2 st) where perception changes from declarative to nondeclarative. However, while Japanese subjects perceive stimulus 4 (also the following stimulus 5) as exclamatory, Russian subjects judge that stimulus 4 is more likely to be an interrogative, and they cannot reliably identify stimulus 5. The

䉴 Figure 2. Percentage stimuli identi"cation by Japanese and Russian subjects. The horizontal axes indicate the number of stimuli in each series; vertical axes indicate the percentage of stimuli identi"ed as one of the three sentence types. The text in each panel indicates the number of the Series (1}6) and the sentence type which applies to that panel (s*statement; q*question; e*exclamation). Stars under a stimulus number indicate a stimulus which give rise to a signi"cantly di!erent response across the two group of listeners.

Sentence-type intonation perception

147

148

<. Makarova

perception of stimuli 4 (s(2)"26.99, p(0.001) and 5 (s(2)"12.783, p(0.01) by Japanese and Russian subjects is signi"cantly di!erent. Nondeclarative responses to stimuli beyond number 6 are not clearly identi"ed as interrogatives or exclamations. There is a weak tendency for Japanese subjects to prefer &&exclamatory'' responses, and for Russian subjects to opt for an &&interrogative'' response. The two groups of listeners show a signi"cant di!erence in the perception of all stimuli in this series (s(2)"25.868, p(0.001), whereby the perception of stimuli as declarative is similar, but the perception of stimuli as interrogative (s(1)"7.535, p(0.01) and exclamatory (s(1)"26.99, p(0.001)) di!ers. 3.2. Series 2 (increasing height of a steep rise) The stimulus (1) with the lowest pitch height in the rise is predominantly identi"ed by Russian subjects as declarative, while Japanese subjects rate it as either declarative or interrogative. There is a subsequent peak in stimulus identi"cation as declarative at stimulus 2 (156}199 Hz), with a small decrease in declarative identi"cation at stimulus 3 (175}223 Hz), and a drop in declarative identi"cation at stimulus 4 (196}250 Hz). The latter is identi"ed as exclamatory by the Japanese speakers, and has random recognition by Russian speakers. The di!erence in the perception of stimulus 4 by Japanese and Russian speakers is signi"cant (s(2)"24.312, p(0.01). Subsequent &&nondeclarative'' stimuli on the whole tend to be perceived as exclamatory by Japanese subjects, and as either interrogative or exclamatory by Russian subjects. Stimulus 8 (312}397 Hz) shows a peak in exclamatory perception by both groups of listeners. Stimulus 9 (349}447 Hz) is perceived as interrogative by the Russian listeners, whereas it is perceived as exclamatory or interrogative by the Japanese listeners. As with Series 1, the two groups of listeners show signi"cant di!erences in the perception of all stimuli pooled together (s(2)"19.549, p(0.001), with di!erences found in the perception of stimuli as interrogative (s(1)"6.551, p"0.01) and exclamatory (s(1)"9.966, p(0.01). On the whole, Series 2 shows that for both groups of listeners an increase in the height of a rise leads to a decrease in declarative judgements, whereby there is a threshold in declarative perception at a height of 196}250 Hz. Stimuli with a higher-pitched rise are identi"ed by the Japanese subjects as exclamatory, whereas they sound exclamatory or interrogative (stimulus 9) for Russian listeners. 3.3. Series 3 (increasing height of a gradual rise) Perceptual strategies for both groups of subjects are again almost identical with the exception of overall label preferences and di!erences in the identi"cation of the "rst stimulus which is rated predominantly as interrogative by the Japanese listeners and as declarative by the Russian subjects. Compared to Series 2, Series 3 shows a more gradual and steady change in the perception of sentences as interrogative (for Russians) and exclamatory (for Japanese) with an increase in the height of the rise. This di!erence, however, cannot be re#ected statistically within a chi-square analysis framework. The perception of all stimuli in this series is signi"cantly di!erent across the two groups of subjects (s(2)"16.008, p(0.001). This di!erence is caused by a larger number of exclamatory responses produced by the Japanese subjects compared to the Russian subjects (s(1)"8.363, p(0.01).

Sentence-type intonation perception

149

As with Series 2, Series 3 demonstrates a decrease in declarative responses with an increase of the rise height. The threshold of declarative perception is at 216}223 Hz (the peak height at the threshold is the same as in Series 2). 3.4. Series 4 (varying magnitude of the fall as a function of height of fall o+set) The only signi"cant di!erence between the two groups of subjects (s(2)"11.761, p(0.001) was found in the perception of stimulus 1 with the lowest fall o!set. While Japanese speakers identi"ed this stimulus as a declarative, Russian speakers rated it as either a declarative, or an exclamation. While Russian subjects tend to identify all the stimuli in this series as declarative irrespective of the varied parameter, Japanese subjects' perception gradually changes from more declarative to less declarative and from less exclamatory to more exclamatory as the height of the fall o!set increases. The threshold of declarative perception by Japanese listeners is at stimulus 5 (114 Hz). Perception changes from declarative to predominantly exclamatory at stimulus 7 with the highest fall o!set (144 Hz). 3.5. Series 5 (varying magnitude of the fall as a function of height of fall onset) Raising the height of the fall onset and thereby the magnitude of the fall leads to a gradual decrease in stimuli identi"cation as declarative and an increase in stimuli identi"cation as exclamatory for both groups of listeners. For Japanese subjects exclamatory responses increase more rapidly than for Russian: stimuli 3}6 are generally perceived by the Japanese subjects as exclamatory whereas for Russian subjects only the last two stimuli (5 and 6) elicit substantial exclamatory responses. Changes of the parameter value have no impact on its identi"cation as interrogative. No signi"cant di!erences between the perception of the two groups of subjects were observed. 3.6. Series 6 (varied vowel durations) On the whole, perceptual strategies for both groups of listeners are extremely similar. Durational changes cause some changes in the perceived category. While most stimuli have identi"cation close to random, stimuli 4 (short#medium) and 5 (medium#medium) are perceived predominantly as declaratives. Although the manipulated parameter does not elicit clearly interrogative or exclamatory judgements, there are two small peaks in interrogative judgements (exceeding 40% of identi"cation) for both groups of subjects at stimuli 3 (long#short) and 6 (long#medium). For Japanese, but not for Russian subjects, one more peak of interrogative judgement is found at stimulus 9 (long#long). For Russian subjects interrogative judgements decrease somewhat, and exclamatory and declarative ratings increase at stimuli 7}9 (short#long, medium#long, long#long). It appears from these data that Japanese subjects produce more interrogative labels as a response to an increase in duration of the accented vowel irrespective of the postaccented vowel duration, whereas for Russian subjects interrogativity is associated instead with the extension of the accented vowel with respect to the relatively short postaccented vowel. It should be mentioned that since duration is inversely correlated with slope, in this series, the slope of the F movement covaried along with manipulated duration. It is 

150

<. Makarova

therefore possible that in this series listeners responded not to duration per se, but to the slope of the F movement.  4. Discussion The results of this experiment show that all the modi"ed parameters can lead to changes in listeners' perception of sentence type. It has been pointed out by Ladd & Morton (1997) that it is problematic to approach to an intonation contour as having a linguistically distinctive shape and an independently variable pitch range. In the present experiment, modi"cations of pitch movement magnitude, height and duration within one rise}fall pattern caused di!erences in sentence-type categorization by listeners. In other words, phonetic variation within one contour shape can represent di!erent linguistic entities. This "nding agrees with earlier experiments demonstrating that in many languages low (or falling) pitch in the terminal accent elicits &&declarative judgement'', and high (or rising) pitch leads to non-declarative (interrogative) judgements (Thorsen, 1980; Gosy & Terken, 1994; Ladd, 1996). Earlier studies reported the major role of pitch range and/or height for utterance type identi"cation. Ladd & Morton (1997) observed shifts in the perception of short utterances from normal to emphatic as pitch range increased. Thorsen's (1980) experiment on the perception of sentence-type intonation in Danish showed that although in general, intonation cues for utterance type are distributed over the whole utterance, the higher or lower pitch of the last stressed and the succeeding unstressed posttonic syllables are su$cient indicators of sentence type (declarative/nondeclarative) in perception. Similar results indicating the importance of pitch range and height were observed in this study. However, this experiment puts emphasis on the perceptual salience of the parameters of the pitch movement (rise) in the accented syllable rather than tonic and posttonic syllable height or pitch range per se, or the pitch movement in the postaccented syllable, since the shift from declarative to nondeclarative (exclamatory or interrogative) perception was connected primarily with the parameters of the initial rise. Increasing the height of the fall onset did lead to a decrease in declarative and to an increase in exclamatory responses by both groups of listeners. However, the height of the fall o!set in the postaccented syllable had no impact on the perception of sentence type by Russian listeners and little impact on the perception of Japanese listeners. Unlike previous experiments (for Hungarian) by Gosy & Terken (1994), it was not found that a gradual rise gives a smaller percentage of interrogative judgements. Rather, it appears that the percept is determined by the combination of the magnitude of the rise and its height. The comparative dimension of this study has revealed a degree of similarity in the perceptual strategies of Japanese and Russian subjects. There was no signi"cant di!erence in the perception of stimuli as declarative between the two groups of subjects; however, there were some signi"cant di!erences in the perception of stimuli as interrogative and exclamatory. Changes in the pitch characteristics of the rise on the nuclear syllable cause a stronger e!ect on the perception of Japanese and Russian subjects than changes in duration of the nuclear and postnuclear syllables, or changes in the pitch characteristics of the postnuclear syllable. There is also a statistically signi"cant

Sentence-type intonation perception

151

di!erence in the responses of Japanese and Russian subjects to changes in the parameters of the rise but not to the parameters of the fall nor to varying duration. The overall similarity of the listening strategies between speakers of languages with di!erent prosodic and intonation systems has been observed before in an experiment by Repp & Lin (1990) in which Chinese and English subjects showed little di!erence in tone perception. Despite the fact that intonational devices signalling sentence type undoubtedly di!er across languages (Ladd, 1996), our results seem to support Thorsen's supposition according to which both acoustic manifestations and perceptual cues of sentence type &&may be less divergent than di!erent authors on the subject would have us believe'' (1980, p. 1029). The results of the present study suggest that there is good agreement between the two groups of subjects in the location of a threshold dividing the stimuli continuum into &&declarative'' vs. &&nondeclarative''. For example, stimuli with a rise of less than 5.2 st can be perceived as declarative, while stimuli with a rise of over 5.2 st cannot elicit declarative perception. The categorization or &&labelling'' of stimuli perceived as &&nondeclarative'' depends on the subjects' linguistic expectations. Russian subjects tend to produce more &&interrogative'' labels, whereas Japanese subjects produce more &&exclamatory'' labels. This fact is explained by more frequent usage of interrogatives with a rising tone in Russian than in Japanese. Interrogatives with a rising tone have been reported to be correctly identi"ed by Japanese subjects (Gurevitch, 1973). Although Japanese subjects use rise}fall interrogatives, these interrogatives are probably in the periphery of their linguistic experience, while the idea of interrogativity is associated with lexically marked (by the &&ka'' particle) yes/no questions with a rising tone. Russian subjects, on the other hand, are routinely exposed to lexically and grammatically unmarked rise}fall (or rise, if the accented syllable is phrase-"nal) interrogatives, which therefore, may be central to their idea of interrogativity. This di!erence in the linguistic systems and expectations has led to the situation we observed in our experiment. For the Japanese subjects, an exclamation is practically the only conceivable alternative to a declarative in a short elliptical phrase with a rise}fall. For Russians both an exclamation and an interrogative are possible choices. This di!erence in the performance of the subjects is consistent with the signal-complementary process discussed by Lindblom (1990): listeners cannot help imposing their knowledge of a certain language on the actual signal they hear. Physically ambiguous information is automatically disambiguated with the percept being shaped by previous knowledge. It is not straightforward to interpret the &&peaks'' and &&valleys'' seen in the graphs of listeners' identi"cation of contours as interrogative or exclamatory. For example, stimuli 6 and 8 in Series 2 are perceived by Japanese and Russian subjects as either an interrogative or an exclamation, while stimulus 8 is perceived predominantly as an exclamation, not an interrogative. This variance may re#ect the proximity and overlap of pitch values for exclamations and interrogatives observed earlier in real-speech data (Makarova & Matsui, 1998). Despite the overall similarity in the listeners' perception there were also some &&local'' di!erences in the perception of Japanese and Russian subjects which can be attributed to speci"c features of their intonation systems. For example, in the series with manipulated duration, for Russians a long rise in combination with a medium or short fall sounds more &&interrogative'' than other stimuli, but not a long rise in combination with a long fall. On the other hand, for Japanese subjects a long rise leads to the perception of a stimulus as an interrogative irrespective of the fall duration. This tendency may be

152

<. Makarova

explained by the characteristics of interrogative contours in production: interrogatives in both languages are characterized by lengthening of the rise (as compared to declaratives and exclamations) (Makarova & Matsui, 1998). However, Japanese interrogatives with a rise}fall have a long fall (Makarova & Matsui, 1998), whereas Russian interrogatives have a relatively short fall, and the total duration for Russian interrogatives is shorter than the total duration for either declaratives, or exclamations (Svetozarova, 1982). The height of the postnuclear vowel o!set and the decrease of the magnitude of the fall does not a!ect stimuli perception of the Russian subjects. This con"rms earlier "ndings for real speech perception reported in Makarova & Matsui (1998). Japanese subjects, on the contrary, tend to produce fewer declarative judgements when the magnitude of the fall is small. When the pitch is raised to 144 Hz (the magnitude of the fall being 7 st), there is a shift to an &&exclamation'' response. Stepping &&too far'' beyond the common height of vowel onset appears to be less acceptable for Japanese subjects than for Russians. The stimuli with the lowest rise in Series 2 and 3 (in which the rise height was varied) tend to be perceived as an interrogative by the Japanese listeners. It is possible that the subjects may associate the low-onset stimulus with the low beginning of the rising tone typical for Japanese interrogatives. If we consider that the stimulus with the lowest fall onset had random identi"cation by Japanese listeners, while the next stimulus (with a fall starting 2 st higher) received the highest &&declarative'' identi"cation, we may assume that this di!erence in Japanese listeners' perception may be caused by stricter limits in production and perception in the pitch-accented language. Finally, it should be noted that the experiment reported in this paper did not address the issue of the in#uence of pitch peak alignment on sentence-type perception in Japanese and Russian, although it has been shown that this factor can contribute to sentence-type disambiguation in other languages (Gosy & Terken, 1994). This issue is the subject of a separate experiment in progress.

5. Conclusion Japanese and Russian subjects show very similar perceptual strategies when asked to make sentence-type judgements from prosodically variable tokens of the same one-word stimulus. There is no signi"cant di!erence in the perception of stimuli as declaratives between the two groups of subjects. There are, however, some signi"cant di!erences in the perception of stimuli as exclamations and interrogatives. Common patterns in the perception of stimuli as declarative were observed. The division of the stimuli continuum into declarative vs. nondeclarative is similar for the two groups of subjects. The categorization of the nondeclarative stimuli is a!ected by the native language system. Japanese subjects are more likely to react to an increase in height and magnitude of the rise and to an increase of the magnitude of the fall (when the ending pitch is constant) by labeling contours as exclamatory, while Russian subjects use the &&interrogative'' label more frequently (Series 1}3, 5). An increase in the height or magnitude of the rise leads to a decrease in the perception of stimuli as declarative by both groups of listeners. However, the impact of changing the height and magnitude of the rise for interrogative and exclamatory identi"cation as well as the e!ect of changing the magnitude of the fall on stimuli identi"cation in general is of a more complicated nature. Changes of duration alone, are less salient than changes of

Sentence-type intonation perception

153

magnitude and height of the rise; nevertheless, duration di!erences do lead to changes in stimuli identi"cation. The fact that a degree of similarity has been found in the perceptual responses of speakers of two quite di!erent languages suggests that there may be merit in further cross-language studies of prosodically-based perceptual phenomena of this sort (and work along these lines is in progress (Makarova, 2000)). The author would like to thank June-ko Matsui for her assistance at the early stage of the experiment, Louise Kelly for her statistical guidance, Natalya Svetozarova and Hakutaro Jou for the discussion of research design, D. Robert Ladd for his critical suggestions, members of sta! of the Department of Phonetics, St. Petersburg University and Department of Foreign Languages, St. Petersburg Electro-Technical University, for their help with recruiting listeners, Ineke Mennen for her comments on the earliest draft, as well as Vincent van Heuven and Nina Groennum for many valuable suggestions expressed in their reviews. Special thanks to Kazuyo Tanaka and Speech and Auditory Signal Processing Group at AIST for their support.

References Abe, I. (1972) Intonational patterns in English and Japanese. In Intonation (D. Bolinger, editor), pp. 337}347. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Abe, I. (1998) Intonation in Japanese. In Intonation systems: A survey of twenty languages (D. Hirst & A. Di Cristo, editors), pp. 360}375, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1986) Intonational structure in English and Japanese. Phonology >earbook, 3, 255}309. Bolinger, D. (1978). Intonation across languages. In ;niversals of human language. Vol. 2, Phonology, (J. P. Greenberg, C. A. Ferguson & E. A. Moravcsik, editors), pp. 471}524. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Bryzgunova, E. A. (1963) Prakticheskaya fonetika i intonatsiya russkogo yazyka [Practical phonetics and intonation of the Russian language], 5th edition. Moscow: Russkij yazyk. Bryzgunova, E. A. (1983). Zvuki i intonatsiya russkoj rechi [Sounds and intonation of Russian speech], 5th edition. Moscow: Russkij yazyk. Cruttenden, A. (1997) Intonation, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (1997) A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 4th edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Dauer, R. M. (1983) Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. Journal of Phonetics, 11, 51}62. Eriksson, A. (1991). Aspects of Swedish speech rhythm. Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics 9, Department of Linguistics, University of Goeteborg. Fujisaki, H. & Hirose, K. (1982) Modelling the dynamic characteristics of voice fundamental frequency with application to analysis and synthesis of intonation. In Preprints of the =orking Group on Intonation, ¹he 13th Congress of ¸inguistics, ¹okyo. pp 57}70. Fujisaki, H. & Hirose, K. (1984) Analysis of voice fundamental frequency contours for declarative sentences of Japanese. Journal of the Acoustic Society of Japan, 5, 233}242. Gooskens, C. & van Heuven, V. J. (1995) Declination in Dutch and Danish. In Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm, pp. 374}377. Gosy, M. & Terken, J. (1994) Question marking in Hungarian: timing and height of pitch peaks. Journal of Phonetics, 22, 269}281. Gurevitch, T. M. (1973) O vliyanii intonatsii na aktsentno-ritmicheskuyu strukturu slova v yaponskom yazyike [On the in#uence of intonation on accentual and rhythmical structure of a word in the Japanese language]. ¹ezyisyi dokladov 1< nauchnoj konferentsii po yaponskoj ,lologii, pp. 39}45. Moscow: Moscow University. Haan, J., van Heuven, V. J., Pacilly, J. J. A. & van Bezooijen, R. (1997) An anatomy of Dutch question intonation. In ¸inguistics in the Netherlands 1997 (J. Coerts, H. de Hoop, editors), pp. 97}108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hadding-Koch, K. & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1964) An experimental study of some intonation contours. Phonetics, 11, 175}185. Halliday, M. A. K. (1967) Intonation and grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton. Haraguchi, S. (1977) ¹he tone pattern of Japanese. Tokyo: Kaitaku-sya. Heuven, V. J. van, Haan, J., Janse, E. & van der Torre, E. J. (1997) Perceptual identi"cation of sentence type and the time-distribution of prosodic interrogativity markers in Dutch. In Proceedings of an ESCA workshop on 00intonation11, Athens, pp. 317}320. Hirst, D. & Di Cristo, A. (1998) A survey of intonation systems. In Intonation systems: a survey of twenty languages (D. Hirst & A. Di Cristo, editors), pp. 1}44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

154

<. Makarova

Hojo, M. M. (1973) Intonation of single-word utterances in Japanese: an acoustic phonetic study. A PhD dissertation, University of Southern California. Kubozono, H. (1993) ¹he organization of Japanese prosody. Tokyo: Kurosio. Ladd, D. R. (1996) Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladd, D. R. & Morton, R. (1997) The perception of intonational emphasis: continuous or categorical? Journal of Phonetics, 25, 313}342. Levinson, S. C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindblom, B. (1990) Explaining phonetic variation: a sketch of the H&H theory. In (W. J. Hardcastle & A. Marchal, editors), Speech production and speech modelling pp. 403}439. Kluwer: Netherlands. Makarova, V. (2000) Cross-linguistic aspects of intonation perception. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken ¸anguage Processing (ICSLP 2000), Beijing, 16}19 October, Vol. III, pp. 452}453. Makarova, V. & Matsui, J. (1996) Perception of potentially ambiguous intonation contours by speakers of Russian and Japanese. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Spoken ¸anguage Processing (ICS¸P 96), Philadelphia, pp. 13}16. Makarova, V. & Matsui, J. (1998) Sentence type perception strategies in a native language/foreign language. Journal of the English Phonetics Society of Japan, 2, 331}352. Matsui, J. & Makarova, V. (1997) Intonation contour processing by Japanese and Russian listeners. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural ¸anguage Processing, Kyoto, pp. 413}416. Miura, I. & Hara, N. (1995). Production and perception of rhetorical questions in Osaka Japanese. Journal of Phonetics, 23, 291}303. Nooteboom, I. (1997) The Prosody of speech: melody and rhythm. In ¹he handbook of phonetic sciences (J. Hardcastle & J. Laver, editors), pp. 640}673. Oxford: Blackwell. OdeH , C. (1989) Russian intonation: a perceptual description. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pierrehumbert, J. B. & Beckman, M. E. (1988) Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Radford, A. (1997) Syntax: a minimalist introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Repp, B. H. & Lin, H. B. (1990) Integration of segmental and tonal information in speech perception: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Phonetics, 18, 481}495. Rietveld, A. C. M. & Gussenhoven, C. (1985) On the relation between pitch excursion size and prominence. Journal of Phonetics, 13, 299}308. Shibatani, M. (1990) ¹he languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Svetozarova, N. D. (1982) Intonatsionnaya sistema russkogo yazyika [Intonation system of the Russian language]. Leningrad: Leningrad University. Svetozarova, N. D. (1998) Intonation in Russian. In Intonation systems: a survey of twenty languages (D. Hirst & A. Di Cristo, editors), pp. 261}274, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 't Hart, J., Collier, R. & Cohen, A. (1990) A perceptual study of intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thorsen, N. (1980) A study of the perception of sentence intonation*evidence from Danish. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 67, 1015}1030. Torsueva, I. G. (1974) ¹eoriya intonatsii [Intonation theory]. Moscow: Nauka. Vance, T. (1987) An introduction to Japanese phonology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Verhoeven, J. (1994) The discrimination of pitch movement alignment in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics, 22, 65}85. Vsevolodskij-Gerngross, V. N. (1922) ¹eoriya russkoj rechevoj intonatsii [¹he theory of Russian speech intonation]. St. Petersburg.