The Phonetics and Phonology of High and Low Tones in Two Falling f0-contours in Standard German

The present paper reports the results of an imitation experiment developed to evaluate empirically the validity of the AM-analyses given for two falling f0-patterns in German by different researchers. We look at the phonetic realisations of temporal alignment and frequency scaling of high and low tonal targets in varying syllabic environments. The effects of two phonetic factors were tested: (1) syllable structure of the postnuclear part of a phrase and (2) syllabic structure of the nuclear syllable. The results show that scaling and alignment are affected by the investigated factors in an unexpected way, so that predictions from different AM-analyses could not be confirmed by the data. We discussed the implications of the results in the light of the proposed analyses.