An Acoustic Study of 'tonal Accent' in Creek

sionaries, native speakers, and ethnographers had previously been aware of the importance of suprasegmentals in the language, Haas was the first to accurately record Creek, the first to develop a phonemic transcription (Haas 1940; 1977b), and the first to provide rules for the placement of what she called "tonal accent." It is one measure of the complexity of the system that some 36 years separate the period of her most intensive fieldwork on Creek (1936-1941) and her final description (Haas 1977a). This paper reports on acoustic findings obtained through instrumental study of eight speakers (four male and four female) of the Muskogee dialect of Creek. Our data confirm virtually every aspect of Haas's description but are offered here because (1) instrumental studies can provide greater accuracy and easier comparison between languages; (2) our study was designed to be general for a group of speakers; (3) we wanted to provide a foundation for more detailed studies of moder speech; (4) Haas's study needed to be