The variability of early accent peaks in Standard German

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the relationships between ‘early’ pitch accents in German and with whether downstep in German is phonological or phonetic. At the core of our analysis is an investigation into the differences between two kinds of pitch accents in which the pitch peak precedes the accented vowel: these are H+!H* and H+L* which are claimed to be phonologically contrastive in German. We made use of two experimental procedures: (1) a production experiment in which speakers were asked to imitate synthetically manipulated sentences and (2) a semantic differential experiment in which listeners rated the perceived meaning of those sentences on eight semantic scales. Although both the imitation and perception experiment provided evidence for a distinction between an early and a later (H*) peak accent, the results pointed neither to a three-way distinction, nor to a categorical distinction between H+!H* and H+L*. Finally, we present some results from an analysis of both English and German corpora which suggest that the difference between these two peaks may be phonetic and attributable to the number of syllables following the nuclear accent in the tail. Based on these results and from theoretical considerations, we argue that H+!H* is an inappropriate pitch accent category in the inventory of paradigmatic phonological intonational contrasts of standard German.