Prosody of voice: declination, sentence mode and interaction with prominence

Abstract

This paper looks at voice source correlates of decli- nation. This follows a line of research that proposes that prosody is primarily signalled by the temporal modulation of the voice source, and not just F0. In- verse filtering and source parameterisation was car- ried out on twelve 3-accent sentences of Connemara Irish (Declaratives, WH questions and Yes/No ques- tions). All have a falling intonation and a H* H* H*+L pattern. The measured voice source para- meters indicate a declination of other aspects of the voice: a decline in the strength of the source excita- tion (EE), an increasingly lax phonation over the course of the sentence, as indicated by the decline in the closed quotient (CQ) and the normalised glottal frequency (RG). These indicators of ‘source decli- nation’ were found across sentence modes. However, there appear to be source differences between the declaratives and the question sentences in terms of the overall levels of EE, CQ, RG and F0. The interaction with the accentuation pattern of the sentence is discussed.