Spectral and Temporal Reduction as Stress Cues in Dutch
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Vincent J. van Heuven
Abstract
Although much has been written on the relative importance of acoustic correlates of linguistic stress for the listener, the role of spectral expansion/reduction has been much understudied. The present article is the first to study the role of spectral expansion/reduction in a two- parameter study together with temporal structure exploiting systematic variation of both parameters in a 7 × 7 stimulus space. We used a single minimal stress pair in Dutch, a language in which all classic acoustic correlates of stress were shown earlier to be relevant in singleparameter studies, i.e. pitch movement, intensity (loudness), temporal organization and spectral expansion/reduction. The results of our study reconfirmed that temporal organization is a strong cue to stress perception when target words are presented out of focus (i.e. without a pitch accent on the target). Spectral expansion/reduction was a very weak stress cue; its effect was noticeable only when temporal structure was ambiguous between initial and final stress. These results suggest that spectral expansion/reduction is indeed the weakest of the four cues traditionally identified in the literature, at least in stress-accent languages such as English and Dutch.
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© 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Call for Papers
- Speech Production and Perception across the Segment-Prosody Divide: Data – Theory – Modelling
- Original Paper
- Spectral and Temporal Reduction as Stress Cues in Dutch
- The Phonetic Manifestation of French /s#∫/ and /∫#s/ Sequences in Different Vowel Contexts: On the Occurrence and the Domain of Sibilant Assimilation
- Tone Sandhi and Tonal Coarticulation in Tianjin Chinese
- Book Review
- The Importance of Not Being Earnest – The Feeling behind Laughter and Humor
- Book Notice
- Principles of Phonetic Segmentation
- Further Section
- Publications Received for Review
