Stability of tonal alignment: the case of Greek prenuclear accents

Greek prenuclear accents show a sharp rise that starts near the onset of the accented syllable and peaks on the following unaccented syllable (if there is one). We have presented elsewhere evidence for analyzing these accents as consisting of a L(ow) and a H(igh) target. In a first experiment exploring the factors that affect the location of the H target, we discovered that in words with antepenultimate lexical stress the H is consistently aligned just after the onset of the first postaccentual vowel. In a second experiment we replicated this finding, showing that the alignment of the H is not affected by variations in the duration of the accented syllable. A third experiment showed that for some speakers the alignment of the H may be affected by "tonal crowding", when the accented syllable is close to the end of the word and/or close to the next accent. Overall, however, the results show that the L and H targets are independently aligned relative to the segmental string: the accentual rise is neither of fixed slope nor of fixed duration. This result, which replicates and extends earlier findings of Prieto, van Santen & Hirschberg (1995) for Mexican Spanish, is difficult to accommodate in a theory that views pitch movements as the primes of intonational structure. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.