Production of intonational phrase boundaries in Dutch

In spoken language, major prosodic boundaries can be marked by three types of prosodic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Although these cues appear cross-linguistically, their relative weight in signaling boundaries is considered language-specific. However, very little is known about prosodic phrasing in the production of Dutch. Past studies on Dutch prosodic phrasing mostly focused on boundary perception, suggesting that pause is the most important cue in Dutch. The present study examined the use of boundary cues in the production of Dutch utterance-medial intonational phrase (IP) boundaries. We investigated these boundaries in two syntactically different contexts: coordinated name sequences and compound sentences. In both contexts, the IP boundary reflects the syntactic structure of the utterance. In the name sequences, the boundary serves as the only means to disambiguate a global syntactic ambiguity, while in the compound sentences it aligns with a clause ending. Sixteen native Dutch speakers produced the target utterances with or without an IP boundary. We measured pitch height, IP-final and pre-IP-final syllable durations, and pause duration at the boundary. All three types of cues were used to mark IP boundaries, but speakers used the pause cue to a larger extent in the name sequences than in the compound sentences. Additionally, we found that final lengthening was the most consistently used IP boundary-marking cue. Our results thus challenge the notion of pause as the most dominant cue in Dutch. They suggest that pre-boundary lengthening may be the most consistently used cue, at least, from a production perspective.