A melodic pattern created by varying the prominence of parts of the speech signal. In English, it is usually achieved by movements in the pitch of a speaker’s voice, but changes in duration, loudness and tempo may also contribute. Intonation appears to be a language universal: even tone languages show some intonational marking. Its importance is indicated by the fact that infants appear able to distinguish the intonational characteristics of their mother’s language as early as 4 days old. Intonation is one of the last features to be lost in cases of dementia, and one of the most difficult to adjust when acquiring a second language.

 In psycholinguistics, intonation is often discussed under the more general term of prosody, which includes consideration of features such as pausing, speech rate etc. It is useful to distinguish it from lexical stress, which is invariable and the property of an individual lexical item. While lexical stress is conceptualised as forming part of a lexical entry, it is less clear how intonation is stored in the mind and how basic intonation patterns are recognised.

The basic unit of intonation is the intonational phrase (IP) (also termed intonation group, tone group etc.), which may or may not coincide with a syntactic unit such as a clause. Each IP centres upon a nucleus, which bears a primary or tonic accent. Researchers have studied the prosodic cues that signal to a listener where one IP ends and another begins. They include:

• pausing, while the speaker plans the next IP;
• a lengthening of the final syllable of an IP;
• a speeding up of speech (anacrusis) at the beginning of a new IP;
• resetting the pitch at the start of a new IP;

 . a lack of assimilation between adjacent words that cross an IP boundary.

 However, IP boundaries often prove difficult to locate precisely in natural (as against read-aloud) speech.

Intonation fulfils a number of important functions in speech processing. Some are relatively systematic. IP boundaries may coincide with syntactic boundaries; pitch movement provides cues to sentence mode (e.g. declarative vs question); and tempo provides cues to completeness and thus willingness to hand over the conversational turn. Other functions represent the moment-to-moment decisions of the speaker. The placing of the tonic accent provides information focus and (assisted by heightened pitch movement) can indicate contrast and emphasis. Pitch and overall intonation pattern can provide affective (emotional) signals.

The multiplicity of intonation patterns causes difficulties for accounts of the perception of intonation– and particularly of the way in which patterns are stored in the mind and recognised. The systematic functions above would suggest that the listener possesses templates for certain prototypical tunes, against which the signal can be matched. However, the functions that reflect moment-to-moment decisions demonstrate the considerable freedom which the speaker can exercise in diverging from standard patterns. One solution is supplied by an exemplar account, where the mind records each intonation pattern that is encountered and recognises consistencies that are shared by some but not all.

Evidence of the acquisition of intonation by infants suggests that certain prototypical patterns may form the basis on which an adult system is built. During the babbling period before their first words, infants appear (as early as 8 months) to imitate adult pitch patterns. The onset of true intonation occurs during their ‘one-word’ period, when they show recognition of the difference between rising and falling tones, often reserving a rise for requests and a fall for deixis. At the two-word stage, the child begins to use tonic accent to distinguish utterances: with, for example, DADdy garden marking possession and daddy GARden marking location. In its third year, a child begins to shift the nucleus to take account of ‘given/new’ distinctions. Information focus then becomes increasingly common with three and four-word utterances.

See also: Given/new, Lexical stress, Phonological representation, Prosody, Speech production

Further reading: Brown (1990); Brown and Yule (1983); Cruttenden (1986); Laver (1994); Levelt (1989)

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