In Estonian, as in a number of other languages, the nuclear pitch accent is often low and level. This paper presents two studies of this phenomenon. The first, a phonetic analysis of carefully structured read sentences shows that low accentuation can also spread to the prenuclear accents in an intonational phrase. The resulting sentence contours…

Describes an experimental attempt to verify meaning hypotheses for four Dutch single-accent pitch patterns as postulated in the linguistic literature. Results show a distinct effect of orientation on appropriateness of two of the investigated pitch accent types; the other two pitch accent types are associated with predicted context types well…

Results indicated that intonation facilitated recall only in the anomalous sentence condition, suggesting that, in such learning situations, intonation may function as an additional component of grammar, rather than as a linguistic variable. (Author/RB)

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language…