Speech Prosody 2008 Campinas, Brazil May 6-9, 2008

Prenuclear Rises in Northern and Southern German

Doris Mücke, Martine Grice, Anne Hermes, Johannes Becker

IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne, Germany

We investigated the effect of dialectal background on tonal alignment in LH rising pitch accents in two varieties of German: those spoken in Düsseldorf and Vienna. We confirm the findings of Atterer & Ladd (2004, [1]) that L and H tones in prenuclear rises are aligned later in Southern than in Northern German varieties, and, more specifically, that both L and H tones in Viennese rises were considerably later than L and H in any of the other varieties. Mean alignment values for both tones in these two varieties can be located on a continuum comprising the values for all four varieties.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Mücke, Doris / Grice, Martine / Hermes, Anne / Becker, Johannes (2008): "Prenuclear rises in Northern and Southern German", In SP-2008, 245-248.