The study is part of a series of studies which examine the acoustic
correlates of lexical stress in several typologically different languages,
in three speech styles: spontaneous speech, phrase reading, and wordlist
reading. This study focuses on Czech, a language with stress fixed
on the first syllable of a prosodic word, with no contrastive function
at the level of individual words. The acoustic parameters examined
here are F0-level, F0-variation, Duration, Sound Pressure Level, and
Spectral Emphasis. Values for over 6,000 vowels were analyzed.
Unlike the other languages examined so far, lexical stress in
Czech is not manifested by clear prominence markings on the first,
stressed syllable: the stressed syllable is neither higher, realized
with greater F0 variation, longer; nor does it have a higher SPL or
higher Spectral Emphasis. There are slight, but insignificant tendencies
pointing to a delayed rise, that is, to higher values of some of the
acoustic parameters on the second, post-stressed syllable. Since lexical
stress does not serve a contrastive function in Czech, the absence
of acoustic marking on the stressed syllable is not surprising.
Cite as: Skarnitzl, R., Eriksson, A. (2017) The Acoustics of Word Stress in Czech as a Function of Speaking Style. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 3221-3225, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-417
@inproceedings{skarnitzl17_interspeech,
author={Radek Skarnitzl and Anders Eriksson},
title={{The Acoustics of Word Stress in Czech as a Function of Speaking Style}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={3221--3225},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-417}
}