Durational correlates of stress in Swedish, French and English*

This is a pilot study on stress and timing organization in the reading of a 1 min long paragraph from a Swedish novel, translated into English and French. A common feature is the tendency of content words to receive stress, which accounts for interstress intervals of the same magnitude in the three languages. In French, minor stresses in nonterminal locations are manifested by intonation contours rather than by durational features. We have specifically studied the distribution of stress-induced duration increase within a stressed syllable. In nonterminal locations (i.e. excluding prepause locations), the emphasis is on the vowel and the preceding consonant in French, whereas in Swedish the lengthening is typically allocated to the vowel and the following consonants, and in English there is a more even balance in the lengthening of preceding and following consonants. In prepause locations the pattern of final lengthening is more similar in the three languages. Syllable durations have been related to syllable complexity and to degree of stress. The relative uniformity of syllable durations in French as a “syllable timed” language is related both to the predominance of CV units and to the lower degree of stress induced segmental lengthening. In Swedish and English the concept of “stress timing” is attributed not to a physical isochrony but to the relative auditory prominence of stresses. On the other hand, the similarities in interstress intervals of the three languages accounts for a rhythmical uniformity which is reflected in the timing of pauses.