Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2016
We are naturally pleased that Xu et al. (2015) have taken the trouble to address our critique of the PENTA model, and it is useful to have a concise restatement of PENTA's aims and assumptions. However, we believe that their reply does not address the key point of our earlier paper (Arvaniti & Ladd 2009), which was that syllable-by-syllable specification of F0 does not makes theoretical sense in a language where F0 functions at the phrase or utterance level, and does not permit adequate quantitative modelling of complex intonation contours in short utterances.