On the salience of prenuclear accents: evidence from an imitation study

Whereas some authors claim that the distribution of prenuclear accents in English largely follows from rhythmic and other non-informational considerations, other authors report a small but meaningful effect of prenuclear accents on the interpretation of sentences. In this paper we report on an experiment where native English speakers were asked to repeat stimulus sentences with one of three different accentual patterns on a word in sentence-initial prenuclear position: unaccented, with a high pitch accent on the syllable with primary stress or with a high accent on an earlier syllable with secondary stress. Participants were moderately successful in reproducing the intonational patterns. The early high accent pattern was reproduced particularly well. An automatic classification algorithm nevertheless produced four clusters of contours, instead of the three patterns present in the stimuli. Two distinct contours were used to signal the presence of a high tone before the syllable with primary stress. We conclude that the early high accent pattern is a strong attractor in imitations, but it was implemented with F0 trajectories that would be analyzed as phonologically different, suggesting an equivalence class of prenuclear contours. We also note a preference for rhythmic anchoring in the prenuclear position.