Declination and sentence intonation in Italian

This work on Italian intonation was designed to test Cooper and Sorensen's declination model. In their model, one half of the downdrift is accomplished in one fourth of the utterance temporal extent; all the peaks except the first are related in a linear fashion and the first peak is correlated with sentence length. My analyses of F0 contours do not support the Cooper and Sorensen model. There is no significant correlation between the first peak height and sentence duration. In addition, a linear declination slope fitted to the whole sentence or to the sentence peaks after the first predicts accurately only a small percentage of sentence peaks. I suggest that local pitch accents and final pitch fall account for Italian F0 contour better than global realization rules.