The early versus the late accent-lending fall in Dutch: Phonetic variation or phonological difference

There are two well-known models of Dutch intonation: the GDI or Grammar of Dutch Intonation and the autosegmental model formulated by Gussenhoven. Gussenhoven’s model distinguish-es – at least – two different types of falling pitch accent (%H H*L and %H!H*L), whereas the GDI recognizes only one type of accent-lending fall (‘A’). The aim of the experiments presented below is to find out whether Dutch has two types of falling pitch accent or not by investigating whether there is a systematic meaning difference associated with a difference in timing of the fall. Short sentences with an early fall, a late fall or a standard pointed hat contour (‘1&A ’ or H*L) were pre-sented in contexts varying the information status of the focused information, asking subjects to perform a number of compari-son and rating tasks. Results indicate that the early and the late fall belong to separate linguistic categories. 1