Coding of intonational meanings beyond F0: evidence from utterance-final /t/ aspiration in German

An acoustic analysis of a German read-speech corpus showed that utterance-final /t/ aspirations differ systematically depending on the accompanying nuclear accent contour. Two contours were included: Terminal-falling early and late F0 peaks in terms of the Kiel Intonation Model. They correspond to H+L*L-% and L*+HL-% within the autosegmental metrical (AM) model. Aspirations in early-peak contexts were characterized by (a) "short", (b) "high-intensity" noise with (c) "low" frequency values for the spectral energy maximum above the lower spectral energy boundary. The opposite holds for aspirations accompanying late-peak productions. Starting from the acoustic analysis, a perception experiment was performed using a variant of the semantic differential paradigm. The stimuli were varied in the duration and intensity pattern as well as the spectral energy pattern of the final /t/ aspiration. Results revealed that the different noise patterns found in connection with early and late peak productions were able to change the attitudinal meaning of the stimuli toward the meaning profile of the respective F0 peak category. This suggests that final aspirations can be part of the coding of meanings, so far solely associated with intonation contours. Hence, the traditionally separated segmental and suprasegmental coding levels seem to be more intertwined than previously thought.