Non-rising questions in North Kyeongsang Korean

This paper investigates interrogative intonation in North Kyeongsang Korean, a pitch accent language making use of final particles. A production study shows that yes/no questions do not have rising intonation, in contrast to impressionistic observations in the literature. Moreover, a perception study shows that the perceptual distinction between yes/no questions and statements is fairly sharp, despite relatively small acoustic differences between them. High pitch is strongly associated with the percept of yes/no questions, which supports the Strong Universalist Hypothesis [7]. Finally, no consistent effect is found between the presence/absence of question particles and intonational realization.