

Peaking or Rise-fall Intonation rises and then falls.Dipping or Fall-rise Intonation falls and then rises.Falling Intonation means that the pitch falls with time.Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time.In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished: Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question. Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found it. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a space when they have a broader scope: Global rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising left-to-right and falling left-to-right, respectively.

However, for general purposes the International Phonetic Alphabet offers the two intonation marks shown in the box at the head of this article. Most transcription conventions have been devised for describing one particular accent or language, and the specific conventions therefore need to be explained in the context of what is being described. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda). Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". In linguistics, intonation is variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. There are differential perceptual processes which are dependent on the native languages.Not to be confused with inflection, tone (linguistics), or pitch accent. Pitch contour significantly affects the perception of pitch. Conclusion: The language tone and linguistic meaning have no significant influence on the pitch perception, but the categorical boundary was wider for Kannada language participants and for nonmeaningful stimuli.

Results indicate no significant effect of linguistic background (P > 0.05) and linguistic meaning (P > 0.05), but the mean values were significantly different across pitch contour (P = 0.001). Results: Univariate ANOVA was used to compare the effect of language background, linguistic meaning, and pitch contour on the perception of pitch. The stimuli were Mandarin meaningful and nonmeaningful syllables varying in their pitch contour from rising to falling fundamental frequency in one set and falling to rising fundamental frequency in another set of continuum. Methods: Fifty adult Mandarin and Kannada speaking individuals were selected, and their pitch perception abilities were measured using a 15-step categorical perception paradigm. Thus, the present study was designed to assess the influence of language tone, linguistic meaning, and pitch contour on the perception of pitch. The role of linguistic meaning was also sparsely investigated in the context of pitch perception. Researchers reported that language tone and pitch contour influence the pitch perception, but the results were inconclusive. (tonal languages) are few such languages where the pitch contour varies the meaning of the word. In certain languages, pitch also changes the linguistic meaning of the word. It is an imperative acoustic cue for differentiating gender, age, emotion and culture, etc. Pitch is important for perception of speech.
