Downward tone within a mora due to intonation in casual speech I feel like this intonation pattern is common, so I figured I better get it figured out. I believe this is related Pitch accent in combination with the particle, which is about when accents get blurred, like this I believe < `` But in < when he says (which is unaccented), it sounds like a different intonation pattern. It should be {LHHH} in terms of pitch accent. I sense it sounds like {LHH}, where the last carries some intonation. Or could it just be confusion with the vowel in that last mora being lengthened? Or just loudness going down and I'm confusing it?

Yes, this is a common type of intonation, which you could notate as []{HHHHL} if you wanted.

Basically there is a downward tone within the last mora, , (which is definitely not pitch accent because pitch accents are at the mora-level, not sub-mora level), and it is a type of intonation used in casual speech to indicate that something is following the clause but the speaker is thinking about it or otherwise putting in a pause or stretching the word for some reason. It's very closely related with and often co-occurs with it (because you need to raise a bit to do the downward tone in the last mora).