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Alexander Werth: Perzeptionsphonologische Studien zu den mittelfränkischen Tonakzenten

The study of Germanic tone accents has been a focus of work on linguistic variation and phonology for 130 years. Up until now it has been assumed that tone accents were best viewed as a phonetic/phonological complex, with indeterminate acoustic and perceptive features. Taking the tone accents from Mayen in the Eifel Mountains of German (a Rule A region) as an example, this article resolves the indeterminacy using modern perceptual linguistic methods. Hearing tests of resynthesized material are employed to empirically demonstrate that, phonetically, tone accents are dependent primarily on the perceptive correlate of pitch and that intensity and duration play only a subordinate role in distinguishing between them. Creating synthetic tone accents in the speech of a non-tone accent speaker lends further support to these results and permits the reduction of the tone accent distinction to just two phonological characteristics.