Alignment of Medial and Late Peaks in German Spontaneous Speech

Starting from a corpus of German spontaneous speech, the phonetic realisations of the two KIM categories medial and late peak were investigated in prenuclear position. The results show that, for both categories, the onset of the rising F0 movement (L) is comparably aligned around the accented-syllable onset, whereas the F0 maximum (H) is independently aligned and predominantly located before the accented-syllable offset or after the onset of the following unaccented syllable, respectively. The data further suggest that also from the AM point of view the two prenuclear rises are different at the phonological level. Finally, the possibility is pointed out that the alignment patterns found for prenuclear rises in other studies are to some extent due to a combination of categories like the medial and late peak.