Challenges in the study of stress - the case of Drehu (original) (raw)

The Acoustic Correlates of Stress and Accent in English Content and Function Words

This paper has two aims: (1) To contribute to the discussion on what the acoustic correlates of stress and accent in English are, a question on which there is currently no universal agreement; (2) To determine whether vowels in function words receive less stress than similarly unstressed vowels in content words. To this purpose, the study analyses 614 occurrences of the lax high front vowel /I/ in read speech produced by 10 male speakers of Standard Southern British English. 14 different acoustic features are investigated. Results indicate that (1) there are two acoustic correlates of accent (duration and f0 slope), four acoustic correlates of stress (spectral balance/tilt, intensity/loudness, amplitude of voicing (H1) and amplitude of the first harmonic (A1)), three acoustic correlates of prominence in general (F1, H1-A2 and H1-A3), and four acoustic features that appear to be unrelated to the expression of accent, stress or prominence (F2, HNR, glottal leakage (B1) and the open quotient (H1-H2)). Regarding question (2), there is also limited evidence that British English function words might be less prominent than unstressed syllables in content words.

ILAS Workshop on Phonetics and Phonology Theme : Synchronic Patterns and Sound Change

2014

This study presents the stress pattern in Piuma and Kazangilan Paiwan, and provides a preliminary analysis on the grounds of phonology and phonetics. Stress in Paiwan, an Austronesian language spoken in southern Taiwan, is known to be penultimate in general (Ho 1977, Ferrell 1982). Unlike most Paiwan village dialects, stress in Piuma Paiwan (Chen 2006) and Kazangilan Paiwan is driven by vowel sonority, favoring peripheral vowels /i u a/ over schwa /ə/. Phonologically, the location of stress is predictable, falling on final syllables if a penultimate schwa exists, otherwise on penultimate syllables. However, inconsistency exists in words with identical vowels—stress falls on the penultimate syllable when the rightmost two vowels are identical /i/, /u/, or /a/, but on the final syllable when there are identical schwas. This study offers an Optimality-Theoretic account, together with an additional constraint that bans any schwa in feet. The constraint aims to eliminate schwa out of a f...

Acoustic Correlates of Word Stress in Haisla

The Fifty-Ninth International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL 59), 2024

Haisla typically assigns stress like other North Wakashan languages to the leftmost stress-bearing (moraic) syllable, or applies the default-to-opposite rule if the word contains no moraic syllable (Elfner 2008; Janzen 2015, 2023). Perceived exceptions exist in words containing long vowels and suffixes with lexical stress. Previous work on the Haisla stress systems either did not consider phonemic vowel length (Vink 1977; Lincoln & Rath 1986) or simply acknowledged that it may be a factor (Wilson 1987; Bach 1990). After finding that all long (bimoraic) vowels do attract stress, we conduct the first detailed phonetic study of the Haisla stress system. We investigate prosodic features pitch, duration, and intensity, as well as the first (F1), second (F2), and third (F3) formants, of predictably stressed vowels in Haisla. We find that pitch, duration, and intensity are very highly significant (p < 0.001) correlates of stress and, interestingly, that the backness (F2) of stressed /a/ is highly significant (p < 0.01). These results contribute to the understanding of the predictability of word stress in Haisla as well as additional considerations around orthographic revision for the Haisla speech community.