An experiment is reported in which twelve Finnish test subjects, first-year
university students of English, acted a pre-written conversational dialogue
representing colloquial English. To obtain baseline data, twelve native
speakers of English were recruited to act the same dialogue. The speech data
was investigated acoustically in terms of f0. Most of the Finnish test subjects
could make, both phonetically and phonologically, a distinction between
falling and rising intonation but most of the speakers were hesitant about
associating rising tones with informational and/or pragmatic “openness”.
Thus, in the Finnish data, “reserved” or “incomplete” statements rarely
combined with rising or falling-rising intonation. It is argued that pragmatic,
rather than purely phonetic, interference was evident in the English
intonation of the Finnish speakers.