2009/12/16

Ladd, D. R., Schepman, A., White, L., Quarmby, L. M., & Stackhouse, R. (2009). Structural and dialectal effects on pitch peak alignment in two varieties of British English. Journal of Phonetics, 37(2), 145–161.

Presentation: Sally

Summary: Angela

In this study, the authors examined factors such as vowel length, sentence position, and language/dialect type to see how each factor influenced the alignment of nuclear and prenuclear pitch accents. Three experiments were conducted on two varieties of English, namely, Scottish Standard English and Southern British English. Results revealed that the impacts of the aforementioned factors were not symmetrical across the nuclear and prenuclear pitch accents. For prenuclear accents, vowel length seemed to be more influential than sentence position. In particular, it was found that F₀ peaks appeared later in syllables containing short vowels. The authors believed that such a phenomenon could be explained by segmental anchoring where pitch accents were designated to be aligned with a specific point in a syllable. The situation was the opposite for nuclear accents. It was sentence position that played a more important part. Specifically, if a nuclear accent appeared at the utterance-final position, it was more likely to be produced earlier on in a syllable compared with a nuclear accent that was not in the ultimate position. The authors believed that this phenomenon could be explained by tonal crowding. That is, as the utterance-final nuclear pitch accents become too close to boundary tones, they were forced to move forward to avoid tonal crowding. Finally, dialectal and language differences were also observed. At the dialectal level, it was found that Scottish Standard English aligned pitch accents later in a syllable compared with Southern British English. At the language level, comparisons made with another study on Dutch showed that English manifested earlier nuclear accent alignment compared to Dutch.