The Phonetics of Final Pitch Accents in American English Polar Questions

In an ongoing corpus study we have found that polar questions in American English tend to be low rising, characterized by a low final pitch accent followed by a rise to the end of the utterance. A study of a minority pattern of questions with a high final pitch accent followed by a rise reveals that such pitch accents often fall on a type of word that is typically unaccented, thus raising the question of whether these words are accented at all. For this paper, we subjected a small number of crucial tokens from our database to a close analysis in order to uncover the phonetic and pragmatic factors contributing to the patterns of prominence that we detected. The results suggest that many of our final high pitch accents are post-nuclear accents in the sense of Ladd [10].