In May 1996 Alice traveled to the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands with Peter Ladefoged on his NSF grant to record phonetic structures of endangered languages. As well as consonant and vowel contrasts in Unangan, they recorded sentences Alice is using as data for an intonationa study of this language. Results so far indicate that Unangan speakers use pitch to indicate word boundaries and clause boundaries. In phonetic terms, each word is marked by a pitch peak near its beginning and a pitch trough near its end. This word pattern combines with a similar sentence pattern.
Sentences start with a relative low point but quickly reach their highest peak near the beginning.
Following this peak, the sentence slopes downward ending with a sharp drop. Results of this study have been presented at the European Speech Communication Association 1997 Workshop and Tutorial on Intonation, and at the 1997 summer meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.