Acoustic Correlates of Stress

Abstract

The use of the term ‘stress’ is reviewed, and inconsistencies are pointed out An experiment is described in which synthetic nonsense syllables of the forms /sisi/, /S⊃S⊃/ and /sasa/ were played to subjects who were asked to judge the position of the stress. The parameters of fundamental frequency, intensity and duration were varied systematically.

The results revealed a high level of consistency between the (naive) subjects. Variations in fundamental frequency produced far greater effects than variations in either intensity or duration, a syllable being marked as stressed if it differed from the ‘context’ fundamental. A raised fundamental was more efficient than a lowered one. In general the more intense and longer syllables were more likely to be marked as stressed, the exception being when a syllable was reduced in duration by 40%, when some listeners marked it as stressed.

The use and limitations of the results and method are discussed.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bloomfield, L. (1957). Language (London).

Bouncer, D. L. (1958). A theory of pitch accent in English. Word, 14, 109.

Essen, O. von (1953). Allgemeine und angewandte Phonetik (Berlin).

Fónagy, I. (1958). Elektrophysiologische Beiträge zur Aksentfrage. Phonetica, 2, 12.

Fry, D. B. (1955). Duration and intensity as physical correlates of linguistic stress. J. acoust. Soc. Amer., 27, 765.

Fry, D. B. (1958). Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech, 1, 126.

Gimson, A. C. (1956). The linguistic relevance of stress in English. Zeitschr. f. Phonetik u. allg. Sprachwiss., 9, 143.

Jassem, W. (1959). The phonology of Polish stress. Word, 15, 252.

Jassem, W. (1962). Akcent jezyka polskiego. Prace Jezykoznawcze 31 (Wroclaw).

10.

Jones, D. (1950). The Phoneme: its Nature and Use (Cambridge).

11.

Jones, D. (1956). An Outline of English Phonetics (Cambridge).

12.

Kingdom, R. (1958). The Groundwork of English Stress (London).

13.

Ladefoged, P. , Draper, M. H. and Whitteridge, D. (1958). Syllables and stress. Miscellanea Phonetica III, 1.

14.

Lehiste, I. and Peterson, G. E. (1959). Vowel amplitudes and phonemic stress in American English. J. acoust. Soc. Amer., 31, 428.

15.

Liberman, A. M. (1957). Some results of research on speech perception. J. acoust. Soc. Amer., 29, 117.

16.

Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Harris, K. S. and MacNeilage, P. F. (1963). A motor theory of speech perception. In Proc. Stockholm Speech Communication Seminar (Stockholm), Vol. II.

17.

Lieberman, P. (1960). Some acoustic correlates of word stress in American English. J. acoust. Soc. Amer., 32, 451.

18.

Lieberman, P. (1963). Some effects of semantic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech. Language and Speech, 6, 172.

19.

Morton, J. (1964). The effect of context on the perception of words. Brit. J. Psychol., 55, 165.

20.

O'Connor, J. D. and Arnold, G. F. (1961). Intonation of Colloquial English (London).

21.

Pike, K. L. (1943). Phonetics (Ann Arbor).

22.

Pike, K. L. (1947). Phonemics (Ann Arbor).

23.

Rigault, A. (1962). Rôle de la fréquence, de l'intensité et de la durée vocalique dans la perception de l'accent en français. Proc. IV Int. Congress Phon. Sci. ('s-Gravenhage), 735.

24.

Siegel, S. (1956). Nonparametric Statistics (New York).

25.

Wise, C. M. (1957). Applied Phonetics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.).