Catalan speakers' perception of word stress in unaccented contexts.

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction patterns, words either alternate stressed open vowels with unstressed mid-central vowels as in English or contain no vowel quality cues to stress, as in Spanish. Results show that Catalan listeners perceive stress based mainly on duration cues in both word types. Other cues pattern together with duration to make stress perception more robust. However, no single cue is absolutely necessary and trading effects compensate for a lack of differentiation in one dimension by changes in another dimension. In particular, speakers identify longer mid-central vowels as more stressed than shorter open vowels. These results and those obtained in other stress-accent languages provide cumulative evidence that word stress is perceived independently of pitch accents by relying on a set of cues with trading effects so that no single cue, including formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction, is absolutely necessary for stress perception.

[1]  D. Fry.  Duration and Intensity as Physical Correlates of Linguistic Stress , 1954 .

[2]  B. Lindblom.  Spectrographic Study of Vowel Reduction , 1963 .

[3]  Beckman,et al.  Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form: Articulatory evidence for differentiating stress categories , 1994 .

[4]  P. Lieberman.  Some Acoustic Correlates of Word Stress in American English , 1959 .

[5]  D. Fry.  Experiments in the Perception of Stress , 1958 .

[6]  Trevor H. Chen,et al.  Mandarin speech perception by ear and eye follows a universal principle , 2004, Perception & psychophysics.

[7]  Antoinette T. Gesi,et al.  Bimodal speech perception: an examination across languages , 1993 .

[8]  Agaath M. C. Sluijter,et al.  Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  D. Fry.  The Dependence of Stress Judgments on Vowel Formant Structure , 1965 .

[10]  Daniel Recasens,et al.  Dispersion and variability of Catalan vowels , 2006, Speech Commun..

[11]  Mattias Heldner,et al.  On the reliability of overall intensity and spectral emphasis as acoustic correlates of focal accents in Swedish , 2003, J. Phonetics.

[12]  P. Ladefoged,et al.  An Acoustic Study of the Tongue Root Contrast in Degema Vowels , 1998, Phonetica.

[13]  B. Rosner,et al.  Loudness predicts prominence: fundamental frequency lends little. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  D. Bolinger.  A Theory of Pitch Accent in English , 1958 .

[15]  V. Huss.  English Word Stress in the Post-Nuclear Position , 1978, Phonetica.

[16]  Maria del Mar,et al.  Perceptual Evidence for Direct Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Spanish , 2007 .

[17]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[18]  De Jong,et al.  The oral articulation of English stress accent , 1991 .

[19]  Daniel Recasens,et al.  Estudis de fonètica experimental del català oriental central , 1986 .

[20]  J. Sawusch,et al.  The processing of duration and intensity cues to prominence. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[21]  B. Lindblom,et al.  Interaction between duration, context, and speaking style in English stressed vowels , 1994 .

[22]  V. V. van Heuven,et al.  Spectral balance as a cue in the perception of linguistic stress. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.