Volume 35, Issue 3

In this investigation of the correlates of stress, account was taken of both production and perception aspects of the phenomenon in the connected utterance of a group each of native and non-native speakers of English. Measurement of the fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration of the syllables stressed by these subjects revealed that duration was by far the most frequently used cue and that amplitude was the least used. The two groups differed significantly both in the incidence and placement of stress, although no evidence was found to suggest that native and non-native speakers consistently employ different acoustic parameters to signal this feature at the sentence level.

From a fiberscope, the tip of which was swung from left to right in the pharynx, cinefilm frames were obtained which showed the cross-sectional shape of pharyngeal constrictions in back vowels. This information was combined with the information offered by X-ray pictures of the same subject phonating the same vowels on a different occasion. The results agree to a reasonable extent with previously published data obtained by different techniques, and support previous hypotheses regarding distance-to-area conversion in the pharyngeal region of the vocal tract.

24 native speakers of American English made direct ratings of dissimilarity between 13 pitch patterns superimposed on a synthetic speech-like syllable. A multidimensional scaling analysis of the data revealed four perceptual dimensions, which were interpreted as average pitch, endpoint, extreme endpoint and length. The relative importance of these dimensions varied across individual subjects.