MELODIC CUES TO THE PERCEIVED FINALITY OF UTTERANCES

One of the possible functions of intonation is its capacity to clarify textual structure. It may indicate, for instance, that a sentence is likely to be the last one in a sequence of statements that build a dis course unit. In order to investigate the perception of melodic cites t o ''finality,'' a series of three listening experiments was performed with short sentences, the intonation of which was manipulated with res pect to different melodic variables. The actual testing was done in tw o ways (1) by pairwise comparison and (2) by absolute rating. A linear least-squares estimation method brought to light that in both tests f inality judgments were influenced significantly by differences in pitc h register (experiment 1), pitch range (experiment 1), and shape of th e pitch contour (experiments 1, 2, and 3). The results of the data ana lysis suggest strongly that these different variables generally combin e additively in producing finality judgments, though the effect of one is sometimes conditional on the value of another.