Compression and truncation revisited

This paper investigates the influence of varying segmental structures on the realizations of utterance-final rising and falling intonation contours. Following Grabe’s study on adjustment strategies in German, i.e. truncation and compression, a similar experiment was carried out, using materials with decreasing stretches of voicing in questions, lists, and statements. However, the results presented in the present paper could not confirm the idea of such common adjustment strategies. Instead, considerable variation was found as to how the phrase-final intonation contours were adjusted to the respective amounts of voicing: the strategies varied strongly across different word groups.