Relevance of f0 Peak Shape and Alignment for the Perception of a Functional Contrast in Russian

This paper reports a perception experiment carried out to investigate perceptually relevant properties of the f0-contours in yes/no-questions and contrastive emphatic statements in modern Russian spoken by young people in Kaliningrad. Only pitch cues were tested (alignment and shape of F0 peaks, presence of a peak plateau). A semantic congruity test was performed to assess these form-function relations. The results indicate that peak alignment is the strongest cue for the perceptual distinction between questions and emphatic statements. Contour shape serves as a secondary cue, with the effect of a peak plateau being very subtle. Implications for the phonological modeling of Russian intonation are discussed.