The role of tonal onglides in German nuclear pitch accents.

A perception experiment with native German listeners provided evidence for the relevance of the tonal onglide in nuclear accents--the pitch movement leading towards the target on the accented syllable. Listeners were able to distinguish between two pragmatic meanings of a short phrase (given/non-contrastive and new/contrastive) using the tonal onglide as the sole acoustic cue. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the onglide merits a phonological status in an intonation model of German and should not be regarded as merely phonetic detail.