Fundamental frequency and perceived prominence of accented syllables. II. Nonfinal accents.

An experiment is described addressing the question of whether two accented syllables in a phrase should have equal pitch maxima in order to be perceived as equally prominent, or whether the second accented syllable should have lower pitch. The latter alternative was found to apply to the last accented syllable in an utterance by Terken ["Fundamental frequency and perceived prominence of accented syllables," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 1768-1776 (1991)]. The current results show that the earlier findings also apply to nonfinal accented syllables, thereby ruling out an explanation in terms of final lowering. The results are discussed in relation to listeners' expectation about the application of downstep.