The timing of Prenuclear High Accents in English.

In English, the alignment of intonation peaks with their syllables exhibits a great deal of contextually governed variation. Understanding this variation is of theoretical interest, and modelling it correctly is important for good quality intonation synthesis. In this paper, we describe an experimental study of the alignment of prenuclear accent peaks with their associated syllables. Two speakers pronounced repetitions of names of the form "Ma Lemm", "Mom Le Mann", "Mamalie Lemonick", and "Mama Lemonick", with all twelve combinations of the four first names and three surnames. These were spoken in fast, normal, and slow speech rates, yielding a total of 360 utterances. For each utterance, segmental durations and the F sub o peak location in the first name were measured.