The influence of vowel quality and temporal organization of pitch ac

The main goal of this study is to test the temporal organization of pitch accent realization in the context of two different vowels, hypothesizing that intrinsic duration does not have an effect. Secondly, temporal organization is tested on different syllable structures with decreasing voicing time, showing that the same pattern of temporal organization can be found on different syllable structures. Assuming cross-dialectal differences in the realization of pitch accents, this study examines the above questions in Berlin German. The rate of F0-change which is measured by dividing F0-excursion on a test item by its F0-duration is chosen to measure the temporal organization. While a significant difference in duration between phonologically long and short vowels is found, no significant durational differences are found between /i/ and /a/. Results show that falling and rising accents get truncated. Similar results can be found on different syllable structures.