Prosodic finality and sentence type in French

Prosodic boundaries are marked in speech by modifications to dimensions such as F0, duration, and segmental quality. The experiment reported here tests the hypothesis that modifications at the end of a prosodic domain may be amplified or attenuated depending on the type of sentence (statement or question). The prosodic modifications investigated here for French are sentence-final lengthening and vowel devoicing, which is related to changes in voice quality. Six native speakers of French read 10 matched sets of sentences, which included both statements and questions. Measurements were made of the last vowel in each test sentence and of sentence-medial vowels in control sentences. Statement-final vowels were less periodic and more often devoiced than vowels at the end of questions or sentence-medial vowels, but question-final vowels were lengthened more than statement-final vowels. These results occurred in questions both with and without a final pitch rise, suggesting that sentence type is more important than final intonation contour in determining how prosodic finality is marked. The difference between statements and questions thus appears to be in the relative importance of lengthening and voice quality modification in marking finality, not in the overall extent to which it is marked.