Relative Frequency Affects Pitch Accent Realisation: Evidence for Exemplar Storage of Prosody

This paper looks at the variability of pitch accent realisations on different word types in relation to the relative frequency with which each word type occurs with a particular pitch accent type (among all pitch-accented occurrences of the word). Results indicate that pitch accent realisation variability decreases with increasing relative frequency. This is consistent with Exemplar Theory: relative frequency can be regarded as an encoding of the diversity of prosodic contexts in which a word occurs. If there is less prosodic variability among stored tokens of a word, there will be less variability in production. It seems that pitch contours are stored with words, contrary to the standard assumption that accenting is “post-lexical” in English.