Figure 1: Spectrogram and f0 contour for male speaker BK. DISTRIBUTION AND ALIGNMENT OF F0 CONTOURS IN TAMIL

Previous work on Tamil intonation suggests that each word in a phrase except the final verb typically bears a fall-rise-fall f0 contour. The distribution of these contours was investigated in more detail by recording eighteen speakers reading sentences containing nouns of varying length in phrase-medial and phrase-final positions. This established that phrase-final nouns can bear fall-rise-fall contours but are not required to do so, and revealed the possibility of longer words bearing a double fall-rise-fall pattern. The alignment of the f0 turning-points was measured to investigate whether the peak is better characterized phonologically as the trailing tone of an L*H accent or a boundary tone. The balance of evidence pointed to the high tone being associated with the boundary of a low-level constituent, maximally the prosodic word