The perceptual importance of falling pitch for speakers from different dialects of Swedish

Falling pitch has long been argued to be a key feature in the distinction of Swedish pitch accents. In this paper, neurophysiological and behavioural evidence substantiating the perceptual importance of HL pitch contours at the word level is discussed. When presentedwith novel words, Swedes, regard-less of dialect,preattentively distinguished meaningfulwords with falling pitch.Falling pitch was also facilitative for tone mismatch detection.These responses tomeaningful HL contours in foreign words werelikely based on transfer from the native tongue, thus emphasisingthe importance of falling pitch in the discrimination of word accents in four Swedish dialectareas. However, while responses to falls were facilitated across dialects, additional dialect-dependent facilitation effects were found.