More on the „Segmental Anchoring“ of Prenuclear Rises: Evidence from East Middle German

The paper presents results from a production study on the alignment of prenuclear rising accents in East Middle German in which we focus on two research questions: (1) to what extent can an intermediate variety be integrated in the phonetic alignment continuum from south to north as postulated by Atterer and Ladd (2004), and (2) to what extent do time pressure factors from the left-hand context influence the stability of tonal alignment. We rearranged the test material used in Atterer and Ladd (2004) with respect to unstressed syllables preceding the accented syllable. Our results show that L is aligned earlier in East Middle German than in Northern and Southern German and that left-sided time pressure effects the alignment of L, but not of H.