Social variability of peak alignment in Russian rise-fall tunes

Abstract

In Russian, rise-fall tunes (H*L) are very typical in yes-no questions and non-utterance-final clauses. In standard descriptions of Russian intonation, the melodic maximum in this tune is located late in the stressed vowel. However, studies of modern Russian intonation, especially within the younger age group, report on cases of ”displaced” melodic peaks—shifted signifi-cantly to the right, so that the F0 maximum occurs on the post-stressed syllable. In this paper we analyse the frequency of such misplaced peaks in Russian dialogue speech, with respect to the factors of gender, age and social distance between the interlocutors. The research is based on the SibLing speech corpus: 90 dialogues with varying relationship between the interlocutors.