A speaker’s use of
pitch can be directly related to the topic structure of the discourse: speakers
tend to use a high pitch at the initiation of a new topic, a mid level at
points of continuation, and a low F0 at topic final boundaries (Cutler et
al. 1997). In perception studies, listeners were able to identify major discourse
boundaries and predict when an utterance was likely to end using
only prosodic features such as pause length and F0 variation (