More on the “segmental anchoring” of prenuclear rises : Evidence from East Middle German

Abstract

The paper presents results from a production study on the alignment of prenuclear rising accents in East Middle German in which we focus on two research questions: (1) to what extent can an intermediate variety be integrated in the phonetic alignment continuum from south to north as postulated in [2], and (2) to what extent do time pressure factors from the lefthand context influence the stability of tonal alignment. We rearranged the test material used in [2] with respect to unstressed syllables preceding the accented syllable. Our results show that L is aligned earlier in East Middle German than in Northern and Southern German and that left-sided time pressure effects the alignment of L, but not of H.