The phenomenon of final intonational 'rises' on statements in Belfast and Glasgow has attracted attention for some time (e.g. Cruttenden 1997, Ladd 2008), but surprisingly little empirical work. Here I present a broad overview of a recent experiment I conducted with speakers from these varieties. I also present some early results from analysis conducted so far. The experiment was comprised of a sentence reading task and map task games (see Anderson et al 1991). I first outline two hypotheses on the source of these 'rises' in Belfast and Glasgow:
Deciding between these hypotheses may be aided by: phonetic comparisons between the realisation of these 'rises' in Belfast and Glasgow (never formally compared before); phonetic comparisons both within and between varieties of statements, questions, and continuation phrases. These phonetic comparisons involve primarily f0 alignment and scaling measurements (see Ladd 2008). However, parts of the sentence reading task were also designed to enable spectral tilt and peak amplitude (see Mills 2008) comparisons between the stressed and unstressed syllable in disyllabic nonsense words with initial stress. These provide another level of comparison between statement falls, statement 'rises' and question (or other) 'rises'.