Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress

Abstract

The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.

The perception of word stress cues in Papuan Malay: A typological perspective and experimental investigation

“…Only for cases in which stress cues are the only ones to reveal word identity, e.g., word disambiguation such as enforced in the current task, listeners show that they are able to use them. This result crucially complements the lexical analysis in Kaland and van Heuven (2020) and Kaland et al (2021), in which a representative subset of the Papuan Malay lexicon showed that stress information could have a facilitating effect word disambiguation, in addition to the segmental information. Although this facilitation is smaller in Papuan Malay than in languages with less regular stress patterns such as Spanish, the results showed that the Papuan Malay lexicon leaves room for a facilitating role of stress to a similar extent as found for English (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland et al, 2021).…”

“…This result crucially complements the lexical analysis in Kaland and van Heuven (2020) and Kaland et al (2021), in which a representative subset of the Papuan Malay lexicon showed that stress information could have a facilitating effect word disambiguation, in addition to the segmental information. Although this facilitation is smaller in Papuan Malay than in languages with less regular stress patterns such as Spanish, the results showed that the Papuan Malay lexicon leaves room for a facilitating role of stress to a similar extent as found for English (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland et al, 2021). The results of the current study confirm that listeners are indeed able to rely on stress cues for word disambiguation.…”

“…On the basis of the current gating experiment it can therefore be concluded that Papuan Malay listeners are indeed able to use these cues when they don't have an alternative. Given that there is a role for Papuan Malay word stress parameters to disambiguate embedded words (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland et al, 2021), listeners have an incentive to use them and, given the current results, will do so. It should be noted that word disambiguation does not concern a problem Papuan Malay listeners face regularly.…”

“…That is, for investigating how meaningful word stress patterns are in a particular language, perception studies are indispensable (see also Section 1.2 and 2.2), and are likely to show different degrees of listener sensitivity for stress patterns (Peperkamp et al, 2010). Lexical analyses have shown that word stress information can help to disambiguate competing lexical candidates (Kaland & van Heuven, 2020;Kaland, Kluge, & van Heuven, 2021). Thus, whether listeners actually make use of the available stress cues if the segments are ambiguous remains to be tested directly.…”