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1 - Acoustic Correlates and Perceptual Cues of Word and Sentence Stress

Towards a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

from Part I - Phonetic Correlates and Prominence Distinctions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2018

By
Vincent J. van Heuven
Edited by
Rob Goedemans ,
Jeffrey Heinz  and
Harry van der Hulst
Rob Goedemans
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Jeffrey Heinz
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University, State University of New York
Harry van der Hulst
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

In this chapter the focus of interest is the phonetic realization of stress at the word and sentence level. While not dealing with the physiological basis of stress (but see Van Heuven and Sluijter 1996 for more discussion), it concentrates on the acoustic consequences of increased versus decreased effort and asks i) what acoustic correlates can be found for the difference between a stressed syllable and its unstressed counterpart, and ii) what the relative importance is of each acoustic correlate in the marking of stress. At the same time, the author considers the question of which acoustic properties are used by human listeners and to what extent these are used to decide whether or not a syllable is stressed. Van Heuven makes a strict terminological distinction between acoustic correlates of stress (which can be used, for instance, to identify a stressed syllable by some computer algorithm) and the perceptual cues used by the human listener, showing that some acoustic correlates, notably the (peak) intensity of a syllable, allow excellent separation of stressed from unstressed syllables but are hardly used by the human listener.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Study of Word Stress and Accent
Theories, Methods and Data
 , pp. 15 - 59
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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