On the acoustics of wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives: Effects of information structure and sex of speaker

In German, wh-questions and verb-second wh-exclamatives are string-identical and can only be distinguished by intonation. This study presents data from a production experiment where speakers produced contextualized questions and exclamatives, showing that the two sentence types differ in many acoustic measures throughout the clause. The results also indicate that the realization of both sentence types is context-dependent in terms of information structure: focus is marked both in wh-questions and wh-exclamatives. Finally, the study shows that female speakers mark the difference between exclamativity and interrogativity more strongly than male speakers do.