15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Pitch Accent Realization in German

Frank Kügler, Caroline Fery, Ruben van de Vijver

University of Potsdam, Germany

The realization of pitch accents in German, Dutch and English has been extensively studied. However, as far as we know, a systematic comparison is still lacking. The present paper is a partial presentation of results of a larger study to fill this gap. Researchers in the Netherlands and in Great Britain are conducting the same experiments as the one presented here, and in the near future, we will be able to compare the three languages. This paper provides the results for German, giving first an account of the vertical scaling of prenuclear rising and nuclear falling accents, second, an account of the horizontal alignment of falling nuclear tones in narrow and broad focus, and, third, more detailed phonetic data on downstep.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kügler, Frank / Fery, Caroline / Vijver, Ruben van de (2003): "Pitch accent realization in German", In ICPhS-15, 1261-1264.