A Prosodic Study of Question types in English and Arabic

Abstract

Prosody is one of the significant features of spoken language, that is, other than the basic segments (i.e., consonants and vowels), prosody affects the meanings of sentences through elements such as pitch, tone, rhythm and intonation. This study particularly deals with the intonation patterns that are used to designate different question types. This study makes such implications by a comparative prosodic approach with a special reference to question types in English and Arabic to point out the differences in prosodic cues that each language employs when requesting information. This will be done through the usage of the acoustic tool Praat, which is a widely used program in the studies of this nature. The results show that both YN-questions and declarative sentences in Arabic and English are characterized by rising and falling intonation styles respectively. However, a new insight was gained with the identification of the different intonation patterns of Wh-questions, where the Arabic language has a flatter pitch contour, whereas the English language has more significant pitch variation.