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Methodological issues in the study of word stress correlates

  • Timo Roettger and Matthew Gordon EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 8, 2017
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 3 Issue 1

Abstract:

The investigation of acoustic correlates of word stress is a prominent area of research. The literature is rife with studies of the acoustic exponents of what is often referred to as stress but the methodological diversity of this research has created an unclear picture of the properties robustly associated with it. The present paper explores the methodological issues involved in examining word stress correlates with the goal of proposing a set of recommendations for future research. Based on a survey of 110 (sub-) studies on 75 languages, desiderata for research on the acoustics of stress are identified: descriptions of employed methods should be as detailed as possible, speech material should be designed to allow for teasing apart word level stress from phrase level prominence, and sample sizes should be chosen according to statistical considerations.

Keywords: word stress; phonetics; phonology; typology

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Shigeto Kawahara, an anonymous reviewer, and the Department of Phonetics in Cologne for their helpful comments and feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. Any remaining errors or misconceptions are our own.

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Received: 2017-3-7
Accepted: 2017-4-26
Published Online: 2017-8-8

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Acoustic correlates of word stress: A cross-linguistic survey
  5. A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation: A sociolinguistic account
  6. Methodological issues in the study of word stress correlates
  7. Morphology & Syntax
  8. From the past into the present: From case frames to semantic frames
  9. Valency and expectation in Bantu applicatives
  10. Semantics & Pragmatics
  11. Semantic values as latent parameters: Testing a fixed threshold hypothesis for cardinal readings of few & many
  12. The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?
  13. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  14. Individual differences in second language speech perception across tasks and contrasts: The case of English vowel contrasts by Korean learners
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Topological Relations in Pohnpeian
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Incremental parsing in a continuous dynamical system: sentence processing in Gradient Symbolic Computation
  19. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  20. Frequency effects over the lifespan: a case study of Attenborough’s r’s
  21. Is like like like?: Evaluating the same variant across multiple variables
  22. The linguist’s Drosophila: Experiments in language change
  23. Seseo, ceceo, and distinción in Andalusian Spanish: Free variation or sociolinguistic variation?
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2017-0006
Keywords for this article
word stress; phonetics; phonology; typology

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Acoustic correlates of word stress: A cross-linguistic survey
  5. A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation: A sociolinguistic account
  6. Methodological issues in the study of word stress correlates
  7. Morphology & Syntax
  8. From the past into the present: From case frames to semantic frames
  9. Valency and expectation in Bantu applicatives
  10. Semantics & Pragmatics
  11. Semantic values as latent parameters: Testing a fixed threshold hypothesis for cardinal readings of few & many
  12. The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?
  13. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  14. Individual differences in second language speech perception across tasks and contrasts: The case of English vowel contrasts by Korean learners
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Topological Relations in Pohnpeian
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Incremental parsing in a continuous dynamical system: sentence processing in Gradient Symbolic Computation
  19. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  20. Frequency effects over the lifespan: a case study of Attenborough’s r’s
  21. Is like like like?: Evaluating the same variant across multiple variables
  22. The linguist’s Drosophila: Experiments in language change
  23. Seseo, ceceo, and distinción in Andalusian Spanish: Free variation or sociolinguistic variation?
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