Vowel height is intimately associated with stress accent in spontaneous american English discourse

There is a systematic relationship between stress accent and vocalic identity in spontaneous English discourse (the Switchboard corpus of telephone dialogues). Low vowels are much more likely to be fully accented than their high vocalic counterparts. And conversely, high vowels are far more likely to lack stress accent than low or mid vocalic segments. Such patterns imply that stress accent and vowel height are bound together at some level of lexical representation. Vocalic duration appears to be the primary acoustic cue associated with stress accent, and the association between vowel height and accent level is most clearly observed in this dimension, particularly for diphthongs and the low, tense monophthongs. Together, the data suggest that vocalic duration plays an exceedingly important role in understanding spoken language.

[1]  John W. Black,et al.  Natural Frequency, Duration, and Intensity of Vowels in Reading , 1949 .

[2]  Steven Greenberg,et al.  PROSODIC STRESS REVISITED: REASSESSING THE ROLE OF FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY , 2000 .

[3]  M. Beckman.  Stress And Non-Stress Accent , 1986 .

[4]  John J. Godfrey,et al.  SWITCHBOARD: telephone speech corpus for research and development , 1992, [Proceedings] ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[5]  S. Greenberg,et al.  Automatic Detection of Prosodic Stress in American English Discourse , 2000 .

[6]  Lou Boves,et al.  Acoustic characteristics of lexical stress in continuous telephone speech , 1999, Speech Commun..

[7]  I. Lehiste.  chapter 7 – Suprasegmental Features of Speech , 1976 .

[8]  A. C. Gimson,et al.  An introduction to the pronunciation of English , 1991 .

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

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

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

[12]  F. L. Sack.  English Word-Stress , 1969 .

[13]  Steven Greenberg,et al.  AN INTRODUCTION TO THE DIAGNOSTIC EVALUATION OF SWITCHBOARD-CORPUS AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEMS , 2000 .

[14]  Dick R. van Bergem,et al.  Acoustic vowel reduction as a function of sentence accent, word stress, and word class , 1993, Speech Commun..

[15]  G. E. Peterson,et al.  Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English , 1960 .