Word-level prominence in Persian: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Previous literature on the phonetics of stress in Persian has reported that fundamental frequency is the only reliable acoustic correlate of stress, and that stressed and unstressed syllables are not differentiated from each other in the absence of accentuation. In this study, the effects of lexical stress on duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt were examined in Persian both in the accented and unaccented conditions. Results showed that syllable duration is consistently affected by stress in Persian in both the accented and unaccented conditions across all vowel types. Unlike duration, the results for overall intensity and spectral tilt were significant only in the accented condition, suggesting that measures of intensity are not a correlate of stress in Persian but they are mainly caused by the presence of a pitch movement. The findings are phonologically interpreted as suggesting that word-level prominence in Persian is typologically similar to 'stress accent' languages, in which multiple phonetic cues are used to signal the prominence contrast in the accented condition, and stressed and unstressed syllables are different from each other even when the word is not pitch-accented.

The effect of prosody instruction in developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees: does methodology matter?

“…Prosody training makes the learner aware, first of all, of the differences between the L1 and the L2 in regularities that determine which syllable is stressed at the word level and which words are made prominent at the sentence level. For instance, the L1 of the participants in the present study, Farsi, is a language that typically stresses the stem-final syllable in the content word (e.g., Ferguson, 1957;Hosseini, 2014;Sadeghi, 2017). The stress system of English is much more complex, with rules that take the weight of syllables (as determined by the presence of long vowels, diphthongs and coda consonants) into account (e.g., Author 1 & Van Heuven, 2018).…”

“…Possibly, the increased memory load of longer stretches of speech forces the Persian listeners to abandon the non-automatized use of English word prosody, and fall back on their native habit of disregarding lexical word stress information, a listening strategy that is typical of listeners whose native language has fixed (or nearly fixed) word stress. The functional non-use of word stress by such listeners is known as "stress deafness" (e.g., Dupoux et al, 2008;Rahmani et al, 2015), which would also apply to Persian listeners, since Persian word stress is fixed on the final syllable (Ferguson, 1957;Hosseini, 2014;Sadeghi, 2017). This will also cause Persian listeners to assume that the syllable following a perceived word stress will be the beginning of a new word.…”

Intonation of Persian declaratives: Read vs. spontaneous speech

“…Enclitics are stressless (miz '-ɛt table-your 'your table'). For more on Persian stress, see, for example, Kahnemuyipour (2009) and Sadeghi (2017).…”