On the Presence of Final Lowering in British and American English

Lists of bean names with two to five items were elicited from speakers of Mainstream American English (MAE) and Standard British English (SBE), and three methods for detecting final lowering in these data were used: comparisons of the scaling of final and penultimate peaks which have the same order in the lists (e.g., third peak), modelling of the data as exponential decay followed by comparisons of attested and predicted final peak scaling, and comparison of interaccent drops in F0. The first two measures showed that final lowering was present in both MAE and SBE, while the comparison of F0 drops across peaks showed only very weak evidence for final lowering. Further, the results showed that final peak scaling was not affected either by durational differences in the interval between penultimate and final peaks, or by the distance of the final peak from the end of the utterance. Together, these results suggest that final lowering is independent of declination and targets the final accent of utterances, indicating that final lowering is grammaticalized in the linguistic varieties examined here. Finally, the differences between the methods used to detect final lowering show that its effect on peak scaling is very small and thus caution is needed when choosing a method for its detection and when interpreting the results.