The single most important way we lend prominence to syllables is by moving the pitch of our voices up or down. We call these special pitch movements pitch accents. There are five main pitch accents in American English, three relatively straightforward ones and two more complex ones. We’ll start with the three simple ones and save the two complex ones for later.
1. High Pitch Accent
…as on the word “million” in the following audio clip:
2. Low Pitch Accent
…as on the word “another” in the following audio clip:
3. Downstepped High Pitch Accent
…as on the words “mom” and “lawyer” in the following audio clip, following after the High pitch accent on “Mallory’s”:
Before we move on, a quick word about the diagrams on this page. They are produced using linguistic analysis software called Praat, and the blue line shows the actual pitch of the speakers’ voices as they rise and fall. You’ll see that they are somewhat wigglier, in many cases, than we can necessarily perceive. This is due both to the fact that some things (vocal quality, unvoiced consonants, recording quality) can get in the way of perfect pitch tracking, and also to the fact that there are some small pitch movements produced by moving into and out of certain speech sounds that the human ear discounts because they are not meaningful, in intonational terms. I have nonetheless chosen to use these illustrations, rather than more stylized ones, because I think something valuable is gained by looking at the actual pitch track as you listen to the audio.
The pitch of the speakers’ voices is measured in Hertz (Hz), which is the number of times per second their vocal folds come together and apart. The scale of each diagram is adjusted to the speaker’s range for the utterance, and can be seen on the left-hand side.
On the next page, we’ll look at the High Pitch Accent in a little more detail.