Intonation segments and segmental intonation

An acoustic analysis of a German dialogue corpus showed that the sound qualities and durations of fricatives, vocoids, and diphthongs at the ends of question and statement utterances varied systematically with the utterance-final intonation segments, which were high-rising in the questions and terminal-falling in the statements. The ways in which the variations relate to phenomena like sibilant/spectral pitch and intrinsic F0 suggest that they are meant to support the pitch course. Thus, they may be called segmental intonations.