The production and perception of potentially ambiguous intonation contours by speakers of Russian and Japanese

The study deals with the production and perception of short Russian and Japanese declaratives, interrogatives and exclamations with similar segments and rise-fall or falling intonation contours. Results indicate that intonation can successfully function as the only means of sentence type disambiguation even for short phrases with similar (potentially ambiguous) contours for Russian listeners, whereas interrogative and exclamatory contours remain ambiguous for the Japanese. Factors accounting for sentence type misidentification include differences between Russian and Japanese intonation contour parameters such as peak timings, end timings, pitch slope, and pitch range