Alignment of L and H in bitonal pitch accents: testing two hypotheses

Two kinds of principles governing the timing or alignment of tonal targets have been proposed in modern theories of intonational phonology: first, targets may align with respect to the segmental string, and second, targets may align with respect to one another. We shed light on these two proposals by presenting an analysis of data from Ladd and Schepman (J. Phonetics 31 (2003) 81), which had found effects of syllable boundary location on the alignment of the fundamental frequency (F0) minimum at the beginning of a rising (L+H*) pitch accent in English. We investigated the effects of syllable boundary placement on the alignment of the accentual 1 maximum (H) relative to the F0 minimum (L) and relative to the onset of the stressed vowel (V). The syllable boundary manipulation significantly affects the duration of the interval between L and H, but not the duration of the interval between V and H. This suggests that the two tones in a bitonal L+H* pitch accent are aligned with respect to the segmental string, rather than each other. This contributes to a growing body of evidence that the fixed tonal alignment entailed in the original definition of bitonal pitch accents is at odds with phonetic facts.