We conducted a production experiment with 1600 potentially ambiguous utterances distinguished by word boundary location in Catalan and Spanish (e.g., Cat. mirà batalles ‘(s)he looked at battles’ vs. mirava talles ‘I/(s)he used to look at carvings’; Span. da balazos ‘(s)he fires shots’ vs. daba lazos ‘I/(s)he gave ribbons’; stressed syllables are underlined). Results revealed strong effects of within-word position on H location. Peaks tended to be timed earlier with respect to the end of the syllable when their associated syllables occurred later in the word than when they occurred earlier in the word. These results confirmed previous findings for other languages ( Silverman & Pierrehumbert, 1990 for English; Arvaniti, Ladd, & Mennen, 1998 for Greek; and Ishihara, 2006 for Japanese; and Godjevac, 2000 for Serbo-Croatian) and for Spanish and Catalan (Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg, 1995 for Spanish; de la Mota, 2005; Simonet, 2006, Simonet & Torreira, 2005 for Catalan). A set of perception experiments suggested that tonal alignment patterns influence listeners’ judgments of word boundary location both in Catalan and in Spanish. Listeners were able to employ fine allophonic details of H tonal alignment due to within-word position to identify lexical items that are ambiguous for word-boundary position. The data is consistent with the view that prosodic structure plays an essential part in determining the temporal coordination of f0 contours with segmental material.

Parts of this study were presented at the ESF International Conference on Tone and Intonation (Santorini, September 2004), the 2nd Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia (Bellaterra, June 2005), the Xth Conference on Laboratory Phonology (Paris, June 2006) and at talks at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (Aix-en-Provence, April 2005) and Institut de la Communication Parlée (Grenoble, November 2005). We are grateful to the audience at these conferences, and especially to C. de la Mota, G. Elordieta, C. Gussenhoven, J.I. Hualde, D.R. Ladd, H. Lœvenbruck, J. Kingston, C. Petrone, M. Simonet, F. Torreira, P. Welby for very useful feedback. We are grateful to friends and colleagues for their participation in the production and perception experiments. We would like to thank the Associate Editor and the three reviewers (D.R. Ladd, P. Welby, and an anonymous reviewer) for their very thorough reviews which have helped improved the final quality of the paper. Finally, we would like to thank F. Torreira and P. Welby, for their help with the Praat scripts, C. André, M. D’Imperio and C. Petrone for their support with the use of Perceval, and the SEA (Servei d’Estadística de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) for their help with the statistical analysis of the data. This research has been funded by projects FFI2009-07648/FILO and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 Programme CSD2007-00012 (both awarded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) and by project 2009 SGR 701 (awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya).