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

There is mounting evidence suggesting that temporal information is necessary in representations of lexical tone. Gestural models of tone provide a natural entry point to linking abstract association with physical realization, but remain underdeveloped. 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 phonetic duration of syllable onsets of candidate tone-bearing units in falling (experiment 1) and rising (experiment 2) pitch accents, and measured the effects on the timing of F0 excursions. Consistent interactions between F0 excursions and the segmental content indicate that the phonological system of abstract tone association is the same in both dialects, despite differences in temporal alignment. We argue that this apparent mismatch between association and alignment 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.