Please feel free to reach out over [email][1]. I’d always be happy to arrange for individual skype meetings, too.
In this talk, I present experimental evidence for correlations between the shape of the sentence-final rise in English and the perceived speaker confidence as well as their response expectation. Specifically, I report the findings of a complex perception study where native speakers of Canadian English rated speaker confidence and response expectation for rising declaratives. These declaratives varied in excursion and duration of the final pitch movement. The reported interpretability of the shape of a sentence-final rise suggests that previous characterizations of intonational meaning that only rely on bitonal distinctions (e.g. Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990; Bartels1997; Truckenbrodt 2012) need to integrate phonetic detail to model the encoding of speaker attitudes. The reported findings also point to the possibility of an independent perception of excursion and duration, which has been the subject of controversy previous investigations of prosody (Rietveld & Gussenhoven1978; Ladd & Mourton 1997; Armstrong_et al. 2015). I conclude with a comparison of the reported findings with those of a replication study that investigated the same variables for rising interrogatives.__
[1]: mailto:johannes.heim@uni-greifswald.de