Acoustic properties of prominence and foot structure in Arabic

Vogel, Irene; Athanasopoulou, Angeliki; Pincus, Nadya

doi:10.1075/sal.5.04vog

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Binary Logistic Regression Analyses (BLRA [5]) were used to assess the roles of the acoustic properties, together and individually, in distinguishing among the different syllable positions and between the two focus contexts in each language.…”

Section: Statistical Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Athanasopoulou

Vogel

2016

Interspeech 2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Languages frequently express focus by enhancing various acoustic attributes of an utterance, but it is widely accepted that the main enhancement appears on stressed syllables. In languages without lexical stress, the question arises as to how focus is acoustically manifested. We thus examine the acoustic properties associated with prominence in three stressless languages, Indonesian, Korean and Vietnamese, comparing real three-syllable words in non-focused and focused contexts. Despite other prosodic differences, our findings confirm that none of the languages exhibits stress in the absence of focus, and under focus, no syllable shows consistent enhancement that could be indirectly interpreted as a manifestation of focus. Instead, a combination of boundary phenomena consistent with the right edge of a major prosodic constituent (Intonational Phrase) appears in each language: increased duration on the final syllable and in Indonesian and Korean, a decrease in F0. Since these properties are also found in languages with stress, we suggest that boundary phenomena signaling a major prosodic constituent break are used universally to indicate focus, regardless of a language's word-prosody; stress languages may use the same boundary properties, but these are most likely to be combined with enhancement of the stressed syllable of a word.

show abstract

Section: Statistical Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Athanasopoulou

Vogel

2016

Interspeech 2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian

Athanasopoulou¹,

Vogel²,

Pincus³

2021

J. Ling.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

show abstract

Fixed stress as phonological redundancy

Vogel

2020

Approaches to Hungarian

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

From the perspective of word prosody, fixed stress languages such as Hungarian may seem rather uninteresting: stress, by definition, always falls on the same position in a word. This paper examines the acoustic properties of Hungarian stress based on a large, systematically collected, corpus and considers them in relation to issues of redundancy in speech production and in speech perception (stress deafness). The Hungarian findings also serve as the basis of comparison for languages with other types of stress systems, analysed with the same methods: Turkish, Arabic and Spanish. It is demonstrated that stress predictability affects both speech production and perception, and also that its effect may be mitigated by exceptions in otherwise predictable stress languages.

show abstract

Acoustic properties of prominence and foot structure in Arabic

Cited by 4 publications

References 19 publications

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian

Fixed stress as phonological redundancy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About