High-rising terminals and fall-rise tunes in Australian english

It is usually claimed that statement high rises in Australian English are more or less phonetically identical to yes/no question rises. In this paper, statement high rises and question rises were examined in a corpus of controlled spontaneous speech (i.e. map task dialogues) to see if this is the case. It appears that speakers in this study used different kinds of rises for declaratives and questions. The majority of statement high rises were realized with a low pitch accent onset, whereas almost all question rises were produced with high pitch accent onsets. High-range fall-rises also appeared to be used by some speakers in the same way as statement high rises. Implications of these findings for the current ToBI analysis of Australian English are considered.