ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006

Stress and Accent: Acoustic Correlates of Metrical Prominence in Catalan

Lluïsa Astruc (1), Pilar Prieto (2)

(1) Faculty of Education and Languages, The Open University, UK
(2) ICREA-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

This study examines the phonetic correlates of stress and accent in Catalan, analyzing syllable duration, spectral balance, vowel quality, and overall intensity in two stress [stressed, unstressed] and in two accent conditions [accented, unaccented]. Catalan reveals systematic phonetic differences between accent and stress, consistent with previous work on Dutch, English, and Spanish (Slujter & van Heuven 1996a, 1996b; Campbell & Beckman 1997, Ortega-Llebaría & Prieto 2006). Duration, spectral balance, and vowel quality are reliable acoustic correlates of stress, while accent is acoustically marked by overall intensity and pitch. Duration, at least in Catalan, is not a reliable indicator of accent since accentual lengthening was found only in speakers who produced some accents with a wider pitch range.

References

• Campbell, N. and Beckman, M. 1997. Stress, prominence and spectral tilt. In Botinis, A.; Kouroupetroglou, G; and G. Crayiannis (eds.), Intonation: theory, models and applications. Proc. of and ESCA Workshop, Athens, Greece.
• Ortega-Llebaria, M. and Prieto, P. 2006. Stress and accent in Catalan and Spanish: patterns of duration, vowel quality, overall intensity, and spectral balance. Proc. Speech Prosody. Dresden, Germany. 337-340.
• Sluijter, A. and van Heuven, V. 1996a. Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100 (4). 2471-2485.
• Sluijter, A. and van Heuven, V. 1996b. Acoustic correlates of linguistic stress and accent in Dutch and American English. Proc. of ICSL, 96. Philadelphia: Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories, Alfred I duPont Institue, 630-633.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Astruc, Lluïsa / Prieto, Pilar (2006): "Stress and accent: acoustic correlates of metrical prominence in Catalan", In ExLing-2006, 73-76.