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

This paper looks at voice source correlates of declination. 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. Inverse filtering and source parameterisation was carried out on twelve 3-accent sentences of Connemara Irish (Declaratives, WH questions and Yes/No questions). All have a falling intonation and a H* H* H*+L pattern. The measured voice source parameters indicate a declination of other aspects of the voice: a decline in the strength of the source excitation (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 declination’ 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.