Phonological Realization of English Lexical Stress Placement by Native (L1) Bengali Speakers (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional and involving manipulation of duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel quality. The current study investigates the acquisition of English lexical stress by L1 Bengali speakers at the phonological level in terms of the properties of acoustic cues. For this purpose, this study compares 20 L1 Bengali speakers' use of acoustic correlates for the production of English lexical stress in context sentence and neutral frame sentence. The result of this study showed that L1 Bengali speakers were not able to achieve neutral frame sentence like control over duration, intensity, F0 and to a limited extent vowel quality in context sentence. As a result, unlike neutral frame sentence, L1 Bengali speakers were not sensitive to English lexical stress contrast in context sentence. This analysis reveals that, the difference between the neutral frame and context sentences in terms of L1 Bengali speakers’ realization of phonol...
English lexical stress is multidimensional in nature and acoustically related to combination of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most difficult for Bengali speakers to acquire. This study compares the use of these correlates in the production of English lexical stress contrasts by 10 L1 English and 20 L1 Bengali speakers. Results showed that although Bengali speakers used all four acoustic correlates in similar manner like English speakers, but they produced significantly less native like stress patterns. English speakers reduced vowel duration significantly more in the unstressed vowels compared to Bengali speakers and degree of intensity and F0 increase in stressed vowels by English speakers was higher than that by Bengali speakers. There were also significant differences in formant patterns across speaker groups, such that Bengali speakers produced English like vowel reduction in certain unstressed syllables, but in other cases Bengali speakers have tendency to either not reduce or incorrectly reduce vowels in unstressed syllables. Results suggest that Bengali speakers' production of English lexical stress contrast is influenced by L1 language experience and L1 phonology.
English lexical stress is acoustically related to combination of duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (F 0 ) and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with production of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most difficult for L1 Bengali speakers to acquire. This study compares the use of these correlates in the production of English lexical stress contrasts by 10 L1 English and 20 L1 Bengali speakers. The results showed that L1 Bengali speakers produced significantly less native like stress patterns, although they used all four acoustic correlates to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables. L1 English speakers reduced vowel duration significantly more in the unstressed vowels compared to L1 Bengali speakers and degree of intensity and F 0 increase in stressed vowels by L1 English speakers was higher than that by L1 Bengali speakers. There were also significant differences in formant patterns across speaker groups, such that L1 Bengali speakers produced English like vowel reduction in certain unstressed syllables, but in other cases, L1 Bengali speakers had tendency to either not reduce or incorrectly reduce vowels in unstressed syllables. The results suggest that L1 Bengali speakers' production of English lexical stress contrast is influenced by L1 language experience and L1 phonology.
— English lexical stress is acoustically related to combination of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Current study compares the use of these correlates by 10 L1 English and 20 L1 Bengali speakers to find out which correlates are most difficult for Bengali speakers to acquire. Results showed that English and Bengali speakers used the acoustic correlates of vowel duration, intensity and F0 in similar manner, but Bengali speakers produced significantly less English like stress patterns. English speakers reduced vowel duration significantly more in the unstressed vowels compared to Bengali speakers and degree of intensity and F0 increase in stressed vowels by English speakers was higher than that by Bengali speakers. Moreover Bengali speakers produced English like vowel quality in certain unstressed syllables, but in other cases there were significant differences in vowel quality across groups. This study supports the idea of interference from L1 to L2 (nonnative) phonology.
The Placement and Acoustic Realisation of Primary and Secondary Stress in Indian English
This study examined the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Indian English. Together with the patterns of lexical stress placement, the parameters of syllable duration, pitch slope, intensity and spectral balance were examined in six noun-verb pairs. Two L1 backgrounds (Hindi and Malayalam) were examined. Results showed that lexical stress placement varied substantially across the speakers, but was in the majority of cases on the same syllable as in American or British English. Second, speakers relied on (in order of importance) differences in intensity, spectral balance, duration, and pitch slope to distinguish primary from secondary stress. The results also showed that Indian English differs from other varieties in the phonetic realisation of the primary-secondary stress distinction.
Lexical Stress Perception in Indian Englishes
Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023), 2023
We report an experiment investigating the relative weighting of acoustic cues (vowel quality, intensity, duration and f0) in lexical stress perception in Indian English (IndE), compared with Southern Standard British English (SSBE). GLMM modelling of responses shows both similarities (e.g. vowel quality was by far the most important cue for both IndE and SSBE) and differences (IndE listeners were less sensitive to all cues except duration, and made least use of f0). Differentiating IndE participants according to L1 background (Indo-Aryan vs Dravidian), however, reveals a finer-grained picture, with L1 Indo-Aryan listeners exhibiting cue hierarchy and degree of cue strength that are closer to SSBE listeners. For L1 Dravidian listeners, while vowel quality remains the most important cue, the strength of this cue, and that of intensity, are significantly lower than for L1 Indo-Aryan and SSBE listeners. At the same time, duration ranks more highly for these listeners.
Phonetic Cues to Phrasal Prominence in Bengali English
Proceedings, ICPhS, 2011
This paper examines the acoustic correlates of accentual prominence in English spoken by L1 Bengali speakers. The acoustic phonetic correlates of stressed unaccented vowels, and stressed vowels produced in positions of narrow focus were compared. As observed for many varieties of English, the main correlates of accentual prominence in narrow focused contexts were presence of/and extent of f 0 movement throughout the stressed vowel, followed by a concomitant increase in RMS-db. Vowels were also longer compared to stressed unaccented vowels although the differences were relatively small and highly variable.
Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Nepali Language
International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications (IJSRP), 2019
Stress provides an acoustic cue to a syllable, word or a part of a sentence to convey different intents without changing the meaning. The acoustic correlates of stress comprises of increased fundamental frequency, intensity, duration and vowel quality. These acoustic measures vary according to the structure of the language. There are no reports on the acoustic correlates of stress in Nepali. Hence, the present study aims to investigate the acoustic correlates of stress in Nepali language. A total of 20 native speakers of Nepali language in the age range of 18 to 30 years participated in the study. Ten bi-syllabic words consisting of an adjective and a noun were chosen. The participants were asked to read the two word phrases with and without stress on the adjectives that were marked in italics. The variations in stressed and unstressed conditions were analyzed for the marked adjectives. The peak fundamental frequencies (Fo), peak intensity (dB), duration (msec) were extracted from the adjectives of the 10 phrases using PRAAT (Version 5.3.17) software. S-ratio was also computed for the acoustic measures of stress for both the stressed and unstressed conditions. Descriptive analysis revealed increase in the Means of peak fundamental frequency (Fo), peak intensity (Io) and duration (Do) and t-test revealed significant increase in Fo and Io in both conditions. However, Do revealed no statistical significance in stressed and unstressed conditions.
Acoustic Correlates of Lexical Stress in Native Speakers of Uyghur and L2 Learners
2013
Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed syllables from unstressed syllables; however, a language like Japanese only uses fundamental frequency to distinguish the stressed syllables from unstressed syllables. This study investigates the stress pattern of Uyghur, a Turkic language, as produced by native and non-native speakers. The first three experiments provide a detailed phonetic analysis in order to determine the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur. In Experiment 1, six disyllabic minimal pairs (e.g., A-cha, a-CHA), contrasting in location of stress, were produced by five native Uyghur speakers with three repetitions in a fixed sentence context. In order to generalize the results from the small set of minimal pairs in the first experiment, Experiment 2 examined the initial syllable of disyllabic nouns that contrasted in first-syllable stress (e.g., DA-ka, da-LA) while syllabic structure (CV versus CVC) was also manipulated. In both experiments, average fundamental frequency, syllable duration, and average intensity were collected in accented and unaccented syllables. The results from both experiments showed that there were significant differences in duration and intensity between stressed and unstressed syllables, with the intensity differences moderated by syllable structure. No difference was found in fundamental frequency. Experiment 3 investigated the role of F0 in lexical stress. Experiment 3 focused on the interaction between sentential intonation and lexical stress in which the declarative assertion sentence (falling F0) and the declarative question sentence (rising F0) were used. The results confirmed the previous experiments. No interaction between sentential intonation and lexical ix Dedication To my parents Rizwan Ali Yakup Höseyin (1937-1992) x Contents Chapter 1 Introduction .