LAUSR

The nature of edge intonational contours as well as acoustics of fricatives have generally been independently discussed in the literature (Hughes & Halle 1956; Ladd 1996; Gussenhoven 2004 inter alia). Voiceless consonants were traditionally conceived as irrelevant to the study of utterance-level intonation and thought merely to interrupt pitch contours (Bolinger 1964). However, Niebuhr (2012) proposes that the two domains interact, reporting that German fricatives exhibit relatively higher centre of gravity (CoG) and higher acoustic energy in the context of rising intonation. This phenomenon, known as segmental intonation, has been found in some languages (Polish, Zygis et al. 2014; Dutch, Heeren 2015), but remains controversial in others (English, Niebuhr p.c.). We test this hypothesis by replicating the reading task in Niebuhr’s (2012) study for English and also extending to a tonal language, Cantonese, in which F0 is used grammatically to distinguish words, in addition to intonation. Preliminary result...