Perception of Prosody in Russian Impersonal Phrases with the Meaning of Refusal: Linguistic and Paralinguistic Aspects

The article examines the perception of Russian rising-falling pitch contours by native speakers. These contours have received much attention due to the fact that Russian does not mark grammatically the distinction between statements and yes/no questions; instead, prosodic features are used for this purpose. This study aimed to expand this line of research by using two impersonal phrases with the meaning of refusal as stimuli for a perception experiment. The main advantage of this choice is that these phrases can also convey paralinguistic elements of meaning, such as neutrality/non-neutrality and rudeness/politeness of request or refusal. An experiment was conducted in which 25 native speakers of Russian were asked to identify 90 artificial stimuli (phrases ne nado and khvatit with resynthesized rising-falling pitch contours presented in random order) as questions, neutral, rude or polite statements. The listeners could also mark the stimuli as “meaningless”. During the resynthesis, three acoustic parameters were manipulated: pitch alignment, pitch height and stressed vowel duration. Then the answers of the participants were analyzed as four binary choices. Generalized mixed effects logistic regression models were used to assess the effect of predictors on categorization task. For the question/statement distinction, a significant effect of all fixed variables was found. These results generally replicate the findings of previous studies and show that Russian speakers use late peak alignment enhanced by high peak scaling as the principal acoustic cue for polar questions. For the neutral/non-neutral statement distinction, also a strong effect of peak height and alignment was found. These results conform Gussenhoven’s theory of “biological codes” but at the same time do not contradict the recurrent claims that assume the existence of a distinct pitch accent used for focus-marking in Russian. Finally, to identify the non-neutral statements as “rude refusal, order” or “polite refusal, request”, the participants consistently used the vowel duration cue. Phrases with longer stressed vowels were more often perceived as polite, and vice versa. A significant effect of peak alignment on “politeness” was found, while the analyses did not reveal the effect of peak height on this distinction. To sum up, the experiment demonstrates an interplay between different acoustic cues in the native perception of an artificially created Russian rising-falling pitch contours continuum. Further investigations are required in order to determine more precisely the linguistic and paralinguistic functions of these form-function relations.

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