The Temporal Alignment of L*H Accents

Targets of pitch accents have generally been defined on the basis of production data. Obviously, most of the research on tonal targets has focussed on peaks associated with H*L accents as these are very well identifiable, in contrast to the lows associated with L*. In the perception experiments reported here it is made clear that, in Dutch, the conventional target positions of L* and H* (being the F 0 -valley and the F 0 - peak respectively) do not coincide. The valley associated with L* which gives rise to the perception of a sentence accent occurs much earlier in a syllable than the peak associated with H*. No significant effect was found for the position of the accent: nuclear or prenuclear. Confirmation was found for the existence of the phonological contrast between H* H% and L*H H% in Dutch