Expanding the gestural model of lexical tone: evidence from two dialects of Serbian

Abstract

Featural and gestural models of tone differ on the degree to which they include timing information in the representation. However, both assume some kind of simultaneity between tones and their tone-bearing units, where featural models emphasize the role of acoustic relationships and gestural models instead emphasize articulatory coordination. We present the results of two acoustic production studies on two dialects of Serbian, a lexical pitch accent language. In the Belgrade dialect, pitch accents are aligned relatively late in the tone-bearing unit, while in the Valjevo dialect, pitch accents are phonetically retracted, sometimes into the preceding syllable. We varied the syllable onsets of tone-bearing units in falling (experiment 1) and rising (experiment 2) pitch accents, and measured the effects on F0 contours. Despite these differences in phonetic alignment, the phonological system is the same in both dialects. We argue that this apparent mismatch between the phonology and phonetics can be expressed straightforwardly in the Articulatory Phonology framework by allowing tone gestures to coordinate with other gestures in all the ways that segmental gestures can, rather than restricting tone to c-center coordination.