Pitch accent realization in English and German

Intonation languages have been claimed to exhibit systematic variation in tonal realization which affects the surface form of accents without affecting the inventory of phonological contrasts. Cross-linguistic experimental studies investigating such differences, however, are scarce. This paper shows that English and German differ in the realization of phrase-final rising and falling pitch accents when accents are associated with segmental material which offers successively less scope for voicing. English "compresses" rises and falls; both contours become steeper in order to complete the rise or fall in a shorter time span. German, on the other hand, truncates falling accents; falls do not become steeper but simply end earlier. Rising accents, however, are compressed, just as in English. Within an autosegmental-metrical framework, the evidence may be interpreted as reflecting a case of two languages sharing a common inventory of phonological specifications but differing in the way these specifications are realized in F-0. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.