04 Oct 2005

Doris Muecke (IfL Phonetics Cologne)

In the area of tonal alignment research, it has been shown that F0 targets are phonetically synchronised with acoustically determined segment boundaries in a fairly robust way. These boundaries are generally taken to be the boundaries of segments belonging to or relating in some way to the accented syllable, which has a phonological assocation with the tone or combination of tones corresponding to the F0 target(s). My talk takes up problems discussed by Bob Ladd in an earlier P-Workshop concerning the syllable-based hypothesis of tonal alignment in prenuclear and nuclear rises in Dutch. While Ladd et al. 2000 found a clear influence of syllable structure on the alignment of H targets in prenuclear position (caused by phonological vowel length), their findings of H alignment in nuclear position did not confirm this strong effect of syllable structure (Schepman, Mennen, Ladd in press).

The talk presents data from two experiments which are comparable to the Dutch study. However, the language is German and the search for possible anchors for F0 targets extends into the domain of articulatory gestures (using kinematic data from EMMA recordings). In the first experiment, we manipulated syllable structure by varying phonological vowel length, and in the second experiment, we manipulated accent position (nuclear vs. prenuclear).

We argue (i) that the syllable based-anchor hypothesis for tonal alignment might be too restrictive, in that not only the accented syllable but also adjacent syllables can serve to define anchors, and (ii) that F0 movements are synchronised with kinematic movements that can be modelled phonologically by sonority profiles (of accented and postaccented syllables).

[back to PWorkshop Archives]

<owner-pworkshop@ling.ed.ac.uk>