Arvaniti, Ladd and Mennen (1998) show that in Modern Greek, rising pitch accents have neither constant slope nor constant duration, but rather are quite precisely influenced by the segmental make-up of the accented word. Specifically, such rises begin at the end of the preceding unstressed syllable and end at the beginning of the following unstressed vowel. This is consistent with a theory in which the rise is analysed as a sequence of independently aligned and scaled L and H tones.

In subsequent work my collaborators and I have found that this "segmental anchoring" of tones is a rather general phenomenon. In this talk, I will summarize several of our recent studies, including one on the effects of speech rate in English, one on the effects of phonological vowel length in Dutch, and one on the effects of syllable boundary location in English, as well as additional data from various other languages.

The phenomenon of segmental anchoring has clear implication for speech technology, for speech production, and for phonology. For speech technology, modelling segmentally anchored targets should increase the naturalness of synthesized intonation. In the study of speech production, segmental anchoring may lead to better understanding of production constraints on the coordination of laryngeal and supralaryngeal gestures. In phonology, if segmentally anchored targets correspond to phonological "tones", then the correct analysis of intonation systems becomes a much more straightforwardly empirical matter, and various current problems in intonational phonology have relatively clear solutions.

References

• Arvaniti, Amalia; Ladd, D. Robert; Mennen, Ineke (1998). Stability of Tonal Alignment: the case of Greek prenuclear accents. Journal of Phonetics 26: 3-25.