Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Uyghur

Abstract

The present study examined lexical stress patterns in Uyghur, a Turkic language. The main goal of this research was to isolate and determine which acoustic parameters provide cues to stress in Uyghur. A number of studies have investigated the phonetic correlates of lexical stress across the world's languages, with stressed syllables often longer in duration, higher in pitch, and greater in amplitude. The present study systematically investigated the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur, examining duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude. Three experiments were conducted: one utilizing minimal pairs in Uyghur, one examining disyllabic nouns in Uyghur that contrasted in the first syllable, and one investigating the interaction of lexical stress with Uyghur sentence intonation. The data consistently show that duration was a robust cue to stress in Uyghur, with less consistent effects for intensity. The data also clearly show that fundamental frequency was not a cue to lexical stress in Uyghur. Uyghur does not use the fundamental frequency to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables. The results suggest that Uyghur does not pattern like a pitch-accent language (e.g. Turkish), but rather like a stress-accent language.

Towards a phonological model of Uyghur intonation

“…The recordings used in this paper were made in sound booths in the UCLA and University of Kansas departments of linguistics using the software Audacity. [18] shows that stress in Uyghur is reflected only by vowel length, not pitch or intensity. This suggests that although Uyghur can be described as a stress language, stress and intonation are independent.…”

“…Previous work has claimed that Uyghur is also a stress language [18]. The author examined the acoustic correlates of stress in Uyghur and found that in both single word utterances and continuous speech, only duration served as a significant predictor of stress location.…”

“…Neither intensity nor f0 were found to be reliable cues for stress, suggesting that Uyghur is a stress language, but one that uses a more limited set of acoustic features to mark stress than other stress languages such as English. [19], on the other hand, argues that Uyghur is a predominantly footless language that features intonational prominence on the right edge of prosodic words (with marked exceptions), but does not address the duration data presented in [18].…”

“…the discussion of "Intermediate Phrases" in Section 4). This is largely a replication of [18], but we introduce one important change: we examine the same words in both word-initial and word-medial positions, while the studies in [18] only looked at words in isolation and in wordmedial contexts. We will show later that there is a tendency for different prosodic constituents to be used for words in these positions, and that this difference is reflected in the acoustic measurements, although with some variability across speakers.…”

Dessintactitzar la sintaxi? Preocupacions sobre l’arquitectura de la gramàtica i el paper dels components d’interfície

“…Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986;Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988;Fujisaki & Kawai 1988;Maekawa 1999;Kubozono 2007;Venditti et al 2008;Ishihara 2011Ishihara , 2015, Korean (Hwang 2006;Lee 2007;Hwang 2011;Kim & Jun 2009), or Mandarin (Xu 1999;Gu et al 2003;Liu & Xu 2005;Chen & Gussenhoven 2008;Lee et al 2016). Besides, the existence of the consequential cross-linguistic tendencies with respect to wh-questions is not obvious either: for instance, Amharic has stress-accent (Haile 1987) but also wh-in-situ (Eilam 2008), as do Pashto (Tegey & Robson 1996;David 2014), Uyghur (Yakup & Sereno 2016;Major 2014), Marathi (Wali 2005;Rao et al 2017;Dhongde & Wali 2009), or Ancash Qechua (Hintz 2006;Cole & Hermon 1994). Actually, Basque is illuminating in this respect.…”