14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

The Timing of Nuclear High Accents in German Dialects

Jörg Peters

University of Potsdam, Germany

Experimental studies on the timing of nuclear and prenuclear high accents in different languages have shown that the placement of the F₀ peak is influenced by segmental factors as well as by the prosodic context. To examine possible effects of dialectal variation on the timing of nuclear high accents acoustic analyses were performed on spontaneous speech data recorded from speakers born in Berlin and Hamburg. The analyses demonstrate that: 1) the speakers use different alignment strategies; and 2) speakers from Hamburg tend to place the F₀ peak earlier than speakers from Berlin. Results from the present study represent preliminary evidence that the timing of high accents may play an important role in prosodic variation of German dialects.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Peters, Jörg (1999): "The timing of nuclear high accents in German dialects", In ICPhS-14, 1877-1880.