What does the question sound like: Exploring wh- and yes/no interrogativeprosody in Yami

This paper explores two types of interrogative prosody in Yami, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. (Semi-) spontaneous data collected through the Map Task technique [1] were used and acoustic parameters such as pitch accent shapes, boundary tones, pitch range, and speech rate were examined. The results show that all parameters were used to differentiate interrogative prosody in Yami. The majority of the wh-questions have a falling intonation pattern (H* H* L% or H* H+L* L%), while yes-no questions have a rising pattern (L+H* H% or L*+H H%). Additionally, the mean maximum F0 in wh-questions is significantly higher than that in yes-no questions. Speech rate also differs between whand yes-no questions, with the former being spoken significantly faster than the latter.