Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Central Catalan and Castilian Spanish (original) (raw)
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Article Language and Speech Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Central Catalan and Castilian Spanish
Language and Speech, 2010
The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effects of vowel reduction. We examined the stress correlates of duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt in Catalan and Spanish in both accented and unaccented contexts while controlling for formant frequency differences between morphologically corresponding vowels in stressed and unstressed environments by comparing vowels that maintain the same quality across stress contexts with those that do not. Duration was a consistent stress correlate in all vowels in both languages, regardless of their formant frequency differences across stress contexts and of the absence of pitch accents. In fact, stress-related formant frequency differences between corresponding vowels amplify the duration cues to the stress contrast. On the other hand, the use speakers made of intensity was not as pervasive as that of duration. Specifically, changes in spectral tilt were significant only in Catalan and in those vowels that alternate a more open and peripheral realization in stressed syllables with a mid-central realization in unstressed syllables, indicating that spectral tilt is related to the formant frequency differences linked to the centralization processes rather than to the stress contrast.
Perceptual Evidence for Direct Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Spanish
2007
We provide evidence for the perception of the stress contrast in deaccented contexts in Spanish. Twenty participants were asked to identify oxytone words which varied orthogonally in two bidimensional paroxytone-oxytone continua: one of duration and spectral tilt, and the other of duration and overall intensity. Results indicate that duration and overall intensity were cues to stress, while spectral tilt was not. Moreover, stress detection depended on vowel type: the stress contrast was perceived more consistently in [a] than in [i]. Thus, in spite of lacking vowel reduction, stress in Spanish has its own phonetic material in the absence of pitch accents. However, we cannot speak of cues to stress in general since they depend on the characteristics of the vowel.
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