The phonological status of English and Spanish prenuclear F0 peaks

The aim of this paper is to examine the importance of phonetic detail in the phonological interpretation of intonation by analysing the case of rising prenuclear accents in English and Spanish declarative sentences. In order to find out the phonological units that better account for the rising F0 trajectories in the two languages, I recorded one English and one Spanish native speaker producing 45 declarative sentences which contained words with different stress distributions (oxytones, paroxytones and proparoxytones) in prenuclear position. An acoustic analysis was carried out for both languages so as to examine the alignment patterns of the prenuclear rising accents. The results showed that the similar phonetic properties of English and Spanish prenuclear accents respond to two different phonological interpretations, namely an H* pitch accent for English and an H word-edge tone for Spanish. Adapted from the source document