Stability effects in tonal clash contexts in Catalan

This paper discusses the effects of tonal clash (or strict adjacency between two accents) on the phonetic realization of H* accents in Catalan. The analysis of the data shows that the adjacency of two rising accents triggers a drastic temporal reorganization of the Fo gestures involved, resulting in anticipation of the first gesture and delay of the second. Specifically, in crowded tonal environments we find that the first peak is placed significantly earlier with respect to the syllable onset and offset and the start of the second rise is located significantly later in the second syllable. Thus, the data reveals that Fo gestures are roughly timed to accented syllables, keeping a more o less floating relationship with the segmentals: both right and left-hand prosodic contexts (including clash situations) determine the alignment patterns of both the valley and the peak. Finally, no significant differences were found on the H scaling in clash vs. non-clash environments.