This article reports on a study investigating the intonational realization of context-changing and context-preserving contrastive topics in German. Results of the pilot study show that both kinds of topics can be marked by different pitch accents on the topic constituent, although speakerspecific differences emerge. When speakers do use different pitch accents, low rises (L*H) exclusively occur on contextchanging contrastive topics whereas simple rises ((L)H*) are frequently used for both types. The qualitative results are complemented by a fine-grained phonetic analysis using Functional Data Analysis. Together, the results provide empirical evidence from a carefully controlled study for the impressionistic descriptions found in the literature.

This paper presents the results of a pitch accent categorisation simulation which attempts to classify L*H and H*L accents using a psychologically motivated exemplar-theoretic model of categorisation. Pitch accents are represented in terms of six linguistically meaningful parameters describing their shape. No additional information is employed in the categorisation process. The results indicate that these accents can be successfully categorised, via exemplar-based comparison, using a limited number of purely tonal features.

This study investigates the interplay between alternation preferences and corrective focus marking in the production of German and English speakers. Both languages prefer an alternation of strong and weak, and both use pitch accenting to indicate focus structure. The objective of the study is to determine whether the preference for rhythmic alternation can account for variations in the prosodic marking of focus. Contrary to previous claims, the results obtained from three production experiments indicate that rhythmic adjustment strategies do occur during focus marking. However, despite the similarities between the two languages, they employ different strategies when alternation and focus marking work in opposite directions. German speakers often employ a melodic alternation of high and low by realizing the first of two adjacent focus accents with a rising pitch accent (L*H), while English speakers frequently omit the first focus accent in clash contexts. This finding is further supported by a second experiment that investigates pitch accent clashes in rhythm rule contexts under various focus environments. The findings suggest that the preference for alternation can influence the prosodic marking of focus and contributes to variation in the realization of information-structure categories.

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The research project »text sound«: mixed-methods-analysis of lyric poetry in text and tonal sound (funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, BMBF) aims to undertake a systematic and diachronic investigation of the relationship between literary texts, especially lyric poetry from the Romantic period, and their phonetic realisation in recitations or musical performances. Ideas of orality, sound and voice, which are particularly associated with poetry, are investigated empirically and also theorised in the line with modern approaches to the analysis of lyric poetry. Of particular importance is the experimental approach of speech synthesis, i.e. using computers to artificially produce a human sounding voice; this approach makes it possible to explore an ideal-typical realisation of the text and to test the aesthetic peculiarity of human realisations.