In addition to typological, turn-taking or sociolinguistic factors,
presence of creaky voice in spontaneous interaction is also influenced
by the syntactic and phonological properties of speech. For example,
creaky voice is reportedly more frequent in function words than content
words, has been observed to accompany unstressed syllables and ends
of phrases, and is associated with relaxation and reduced speech.
In Estonian, creaky voice is frequently used by all speakers.
In this paper, we observe the use of creaky voice in spontaneous Estonian
in connection to syllabic properties of words, lexical stress, word
class, lengthening, and timing in phrases.
The results indicate
that creak occurs less in syllables with primary stress than in unstressed
syllables. However, syllables with secondary stress are most frequently
creaky. In content words, the primary stressed syllables creak less
frequently and unstressed syllables more frequently compared to function
words. The stress-related pattern is similar in both function and content
words, but more contrastive in content words. The probability of creakiness
increases considerably with non-final lengthening within words, and
for all syllables towards the end of the intonational phrase.
Cite as: Aare, K., Lippus, P., Šimko, J. (2017) Creak as a Feature of Lexical Stress in Estonian. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 1029-1033, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1155
@inproceedings{aare17_interspeech,
author={Kätlin Aare and Pärtel Lippus and Juraj Šimko},
title={{Creak as a Feature of Lexical Stress in Estonian}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={1029--1033},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1155}
}