The intonation of echo wh-questions

The acoustic characteristics of German echo questions are explored in a production study. It is shown that there are prosodic differences (F0, duration, intensity) between echo questions signalling a high level of emotional arousal, echo questions signalling that the speaker did not understand the previous utterance, and questions requesting completely new information. The findings are largely compatible with earlier findings on utterances with different levels of emotional arousal, where e.g. a higher F0 signals a higher emotional arousal but do not confirm expectations with respect to phonological differences formulated on the basis of suggestions in the linguistic literature on echo questions.