Second-language speaker interpretations of intonation- al semantics in English

Research is reported on the way in which Finnish speakers of English interpret the semantic/pragmatic meaning of the fall-rise intonation in spoken English. A set of constructed mini-dialogues were used for listening tests in which the test subjects were to interpret the “meaning” of the fall-rise tone. To obtain baseline data, a group of native speakers of English listened to the same material, with the same interpretative task. The results indicate that the native speakers consistently interpreted the fallrise pattern as conveying reservation (or irony), whereas the non-native speakers perceived a “reserved” meaning only if the lexical context explicitly supported such an interpretation.