The Role of Pitch Reset in Discourse Organization

This chapter examines the role of pitch reset—a rise in pitch at the beginning of a new spoken unit—as a prosodic device for discourse structuring in Finnish speech. Two different communicative contexts are analyzed: Finnish speech-to-text interpreting, where spoken conference-like presentations are transcribed in real time for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, and audio description of pictorial art for visually impaired audiences. In both cases, phonetic measurements of pitch are combined with discourse analysis to explore how pitch contributes to information segmentation. The findings show that sentence-initial pitch resets reliably mark topical boundaries in both print interpreting and audio description, with higher pitch rises associated with larger topical transitions. These results highlight the crucial role of prosody in organizing spoken discourse across different communicative settings, supporting earlier observations on the discourse-structuring function of pitch reset.