19 Mar 2002

Bob Ladd and Robin Lickley

This talk has a dual purpose. First, it presents experimental evidence that the post-nuclear F0 minimum in Dutch falling-rising questions is aligned with the segmental string in a way that is determined by the location of secondary stress: the minimum aligns with a post-nuclear secondary stress if one is present, and with the beginning of the final syllable otherwise. This is as predicted by Grice, Ladd and Arvaniti (2000, Phonology), on the assumption that the F0 minimum respresents a "low phrase accent" that seeks secondary association with a prominent syllable. In the second part of the talk, we examine the phonetic details of approximately 35 falling-rising questions in a Dutch map task corpus, and show that the alignment of the F0 minimum is determined by the same principles as in the experimental data. This finding allays the concerns of those investigators who claim that intonation is most appropriately investigated only by means of corpora of natural speech, and that controlled speech materials read aloud in the lab are not a valid source of evidence.

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