Planning in speech melody: production and perception of downstep in Dutch

Abstract

This paper studies the planning of downsteps in Dutch enumerations of two to six items long. Is it true that the available pitch range is subdivided into smaller downsteps as the number of accented items in the enumeration is larger, and how precisely do speakers programme the stepsize? Do listeners use the size of the (first) downstep to project the length of the enumeration? The results show that the size of the first downstep (when scaled in ERB) is exactly proportional to the number of items in the enumeration – indicating a high degree of planning on the part of the speaker – but that listeners are largely insensitive to the stepsize as when asked to predict the length of the utterance.