Two conflicting views have been advanced of what defines ‘default’ high pitch accents in various West Germanic languages, including English: One equates these accents fundamentally with a rise to a high turning point, while the other focuses on the fall from it. Both views arise from the assumption within Autosegmental-Metrical theory that the phonological representations of intonational categories can be discerned more-or-less directly from the string of intentional-seeming changes of direction in the F0 curve, identified as production ‘targets’. Two perceptual experiments reveal that, at least in American English, this view critically oversimplifies how pitch accents containing High tones are defined and distinguished: instead, both the shape of the rise and the shape of the fall are seen to contribute to the alignment of the overall bulk of the high region, defined by the rise-fall shape, with the segmental string, and thus to its categorization by listeners as an early, mid or late rise-fall (H + !H*, L + H*, or L* + H). These findings are consistent with the view that the Tonal Center of Gravity (TCoG) of the rise-fall shape as a whole, rather than an F0 turning point per se, is what speakers align with segmental content to distinguish different pitch accent categories. Questioning the primacy of the turning points as the phonetic targets for these pitch accents, in turn, seriously problematizes standard assumptions about the nature of phonological representations of intonation and their relation to the signal.

对于在包括英语在内的各种西日耳曼语种中定义“默认”高音调的音调提出了两种相互矛盾的观点：一种将这些音调从根本上等同于上升到一个高转折点，而另一种则侧重于从下降到下降。它。两种观点都来自于自动分段度量理论中的一个假设，即可以直接从F0曲线中被视为生产“目标”的一系列有意看似方向的变化中，或多或少地辨别出民族类别的语音表示。两个感知实验表明，至少在美式英语中，这种观点严重地简化了如何定义和区分包含高音的音调：相反，上升的形状和下降的形状都被认为有助于音高的对齐。高区域的整体体积，由上升下降形状定义，带有分段字符串，因此，听众将其分类为早期，中期或晚期上升下降（H +！H *，L + H *或L * + H）。这些发现与这样的观点一致，即总体上呈上升-下降形状的音调重心（TCoG）本身而不是F0转折点是说话者与片段内容对齐以区分不同音高重音类别的观点。质疑转折点是否是这些音调重音的语音目标的首要性，反过来严重质疑了有关语调的语音表示形式及其与信号的关系的标准假设。