Alignment of the second low target in Dutch falling-rising pitch contours

Two production experiments were conducted to establish the anchor point for the beginning of the final rise in Dutch falling-rising pitch contours. We systematically varied the prosodic structure of the post-nuclear words by including the stress level (primary or secondary) of the penultimate syllable and the distance of the last stressed syllable to the utterance end as factors. None of the syllable types provided an anchor point for the timing of the beginning of the rise, which appeared to be most constant relative to the utterance end or to the end of the rise. Our finding is not consistent with earlier experiments which found a tendency for the beginning of the rise to be attracted to the last stressed syllable. Additionally, we found that unaccented primary stressed syllables are somewhat longer than un-accented secondary stressed syllables confirming earlier findings for Dutch obtained on the basis of reiterant speech. Index Terms: intonation, pitch timing, tonal alignment