Effects of Focus Distribution, Pitch Accent and Lexical Stress on the Temporal Organization of Syllables in Dutch

In recent developments in phonological theory two independent representations for prosodic prominence are needed in languages such as Dutch and English. A nonculminative auto-segmental structure with high and low tones accounts for pitch accents in focused constituents, whereas a culminative metrical structure which is phonetically coded in relative duration accounts for the lexical stress position in a word. The most farreaching consequence following from this proposal is that relative temporal structure of a word does not change if a pitch accent is shifted to an unstressed syllable. Our results show that, if a pitch accent is shifted (through focus manipulation) from the stressed onto the unstressed syllable, rhyme durations are more or less inverted. Therefore, the assumption of completely independent tonal and metrical structure is largely untenable. However, our results also show a small residual effect of the original stress pattern after the accent shift, which can be accounted for by a metrical grid representation.