Reconsidering Low-rising Intonation in American English

Abstract

Low-rising intonation has long been the focus of many contradictory and unanswered issues in English intonation. The purpose of the study was to determine whether two low-rising intonation contours (L * L H% and L * H H%) should be accepted as distinct intonation patterns in American English alongside three other widely accepted distinctive contours (H * L L%, H * L H%, and H * H H%). Dialogues varying only in their intonation contour (specifically in pitch accent or boundary tone) were presented in a random order to 47 speakers of Midwestern American English. Subjects interpreted the meaning of the contours through a meaning-based test in which they chose one of four paraphrases of the utterance's intended meaning. Results indicate that subjects did not clearly distinguish either of the low-rising contours from the other distinctive contours, and that, given the contexts used in the research, subjects consistently distinguished only three separate contours although other discourse contexts may better reveal meaning differences between the low-rising contours and other contours. It appears that the presence of a pitch accent may be more important in interpretation than whether the pitch accent is H * or L * .