Acoustic correlates of Persian in-situ-wh-questions

This experiment was designed to investigate whether the acoustic correlates of prosody of the pre-wh-part of the sentence differentiate in-situ-wh-questions from declaratives in Persian. To accomplish the purpose of this research 115 declaratives and 115 insitu-wh-questions were constructed. These sentences were elicited from eight Persian native speakers in a sentence elicitation task. The contrast between the prosody of the pre-wh-part of the sentence in declaratives and in-situ-wh-questions appears to have clear acoustic correlates, which can be captured in terms of a higher pitch level and shorter duration of the pre-wh-part in wh-questions and a larger pitch excursion size of the word immediately preceding the wh-word. This finding provides evidence for the claim [14] that questions universally differ from statements in that the former have some element of high pitch that is absent in the latter. In addition, the result implies that the in-situ-wh-questions can potentially be distinguished from declaratives based on the prosody of the pre-wh-part of the sentence.