An approach is provided for clock-pulse synchronization between an amplitude-modulated or phase-modulated received signal and a transmitted signal by estimating the timing offset between the received signal and the transmitted signal by maximum-likelihood estimation, wherein the maximum-likelihood estimation is realized through a pre-filtering dependent upon the transmission characteristic, a subsequent nonlinear signal-processing function and an averaging filtering. The received signal is an offset quadrature-phase-modulated received signal, and the nonlinear signal-processing function maintains the alternating components in the spectrum of the pre-filtered offset quadrature-phase-modulated received signal.