A study of Swedish questions and their prosodic characteristics

Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. This is one of the fundamental observations that formed the VariQ project, a Swedish national project aiming for a deeper insight in how questions work and indeed what constitutes a question. Here, we present some intermediate project results and outline the way ahead. VariQ looks mainly at the Spontal corpus of conversational speech [1], but exploits other data sets to a limited extent for comparative purposes. We report a recent study, in which we selected 600 questions from the Spontal corpus and annotated these in a theory-independent manner. In a subsequent study we compared some prosodic characteristics of these questions with those of the speech used in seven Swedish spoken dialogue systems. The results reveal differences both in the distributions of question types and in prosodic characteristics of the questions in the two different settings.

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