The present study compared pitch contours of 25 German sentences read by two native speakers of standard German and 21 Japanese students. The students had been learning German twice a week for about 1.5 years at the time of recording. The study revealed some features in German intonation of native speakers and Japanese learners. The results are as follows: 1) Declination of pitch was observed in many of the sentences read by the native speakers. 2) One of the native speakers often employed a rising tone which takes the shape of a strongly slanted Italic S in contour. 3) In the sentences of the other native speaker, pitch peak tended to appear in one of the syllables before the stressed one ("early peak"), so that the constituent was often spoken in a falling tone. 4) "Hat pattern," which is claimed to be characteristic for German intonation was also observed for both native speakers, though not frequently for either of them. 5) In some instances, the native speakers seemed to estimate the informative value of a constituent differently, which caused its different accentuation. 6) Sentences read by some Japanese students showed almost flat pitch-contours, which are uncommon in those of the native speakers. 7) Japanese students sometimes reset pitch where no boundary actually lay, thus obstructing the declination of pitch in the sentence. 8) The Japanese students tended to put a high tone on the first syllable of a sentence. 9) They also tended to put a high tone on the stressed syllable of words. 10) They had difficulty in realizing the tone height appropriate to the informative value of a constituent. The results are illustrated in figures of pitch-contour of the German sentences used in this study.
