The Kiel Intonation Model—KIM

At the heart of the KIM is a phonological system. It is probably the only system to date that explicitly includes phonological levels of perceptual prominence, next to the phonological categories of intonation and phrasing that are offered by many other models as well. But the KIM as a whole is even larger. It also takes phenomena such as speech rate, pitch register, and types of disfluencies into account that often extend across several prosodic phrases. However, this chapter focuses on phonological categories that are associated with the domain of the prosodic phrase; it does so to comply with the maximum number of words and because almost all research and labeling within the KIM framework so far has been concerned with these phrase-level categories. As this chapter provides the first extensive summary of the KIM after almost twenty years, the revised phonological system differs quite a bit from Kohler’s early system presentations.