This paper presents original data in support of a new model of intonational phonology for Malay as spoken in Singapore. Building on the Autosegmental-Metrical approach (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986), we propose that intonational variation in Malay can be explained in terms of underlying sequences of abstract tonal units (H and L), which are aligned to the edges and internal syllables of prosod...

Intonational research is often dependent upon hand-labeling by trained listeners, which can be prone to bias or error. We apply tools from Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to a set of fundamental frequency (F0) data to demonstrate how these tools can provide a less theory-dependent way of investigating F0 contours by allowing statistical analyses of whole contours rather than depending on theoret...

Phonology typically describes speech in terms of discrete signs like features. The field of intonational phonology uses discrete accents to describe intonation and prosody. But, are such representations useful? The results of mimicry experiments indicate that discrete signs are not a useful representation of the shape of intonation contours. Human behaviour seems to be better represented by a a...

Within the AM model of intonational phonology, nuclear rather than prenuclear pitch accents typically monopolize our interest as the purported pivots for meaning distinctions among utterances. This paper compares, through one production and two perception experiments, the prenuclear field in statements versus polar questions in Greek, which can be string identical, differing only in intonation....