High vowels have a higher intrinsic fundamental frequency (F0) than low vowels. This phenomenon has been verified in several languages. However, most studies of intrinsicF0 of vowels have used words either in isolation or bearing the main phrasal stress in a carrier sentence. As a first step towards an understanding of how the intrinsicF0 of vowels interacts with intonation in running speech, this study examinedF0 of the vowels [i,a,u] in four sentence positions. The four speakers used for this study showed a statistically significant main effect of intrinsicF0 (high vowels had higherF0). Three of the four speakers also showed an interaction between intrinsicF0 and sentence position such that no significantF0 difference was observed in the unaccented, sentence‐final position. The interaction was shown not to be due to vowel neutralization or correlated with changes in the glottal waveform shape, as evidenced by measures of the first formant frequency and spectral slope. Comparison with studies of tone languages and speech of the deaf suggests that both the lack of accent and the lowerF0 caused the reduction in the intrinsicF0 difference.