The difference between a question and a statement:
A survey of British English Dialects

GOALS

The Data
(geography)

The Data (summary)

Background: Final Rises are not inevitable in questions.

Background: In all dialects:

Background: Correlation between cues to interrogativity and final rises

Shapes of different dialects

Final rises

Slide 10

Despite the variation in contour shapes,
is there anything the dialects have in common?

Can we find out using the orthogonal polynomial
models?

The first Six Legendre Polynomials:

Distinguishing features in f₀:

Separation of utterance types by average f₀ and f₀ slope

Compute the median of each group of utterances

Average f₀ and f₀ slope in seven dialects.

"In all dialects:"

Separation of utterance types by average f₀ and f₀ slope

Other Acoustic Features

F₀ and loudness

Measures of timbre – voicing uniformity

Measures of timbre – spectral slope

Which acoustic properties matter for the 2-way Declarative vs. Declarative Question distinction?

Which acoustic properties matter for the 4-way D vs. WHQ vs. Yes/No Q vs. Declarative Question distinction?

Median time-series of all four acoustic measures (across all seven dialects).

Median time-series of all four acoustic measures (each curve shows median of one dialect).

F0 and Spectral slope (2-D histograms) vs. time.

Conclusions