Acoustic analysis of Punjabi stress and tone (Doabi dialect)

Abstract

An acoustic experiment was conducted to study the stress and tone systems of Punjabi, an under-documented Indo-Aryan language. Tone and stress are linked because tone associates with the stressed syllable (Bailey, 1914; Wells and Roach, 1980; Baart, 2003). The experiment was used determine the acoustic cues of stress and the tonal contours of the three Punjabi tones: default, rising, and falling. Five native speakers read a list of 85 words five times. Measurements of duration, intensity, f0 were made in Praatand analyzed in SPSS. The Mixed Models analysis of normalized intensity and duration revealed that the acoustic cue of stress is the duration of the rhyme. A similar finding for Hindi, a closely related language, is reported in Nair et al. (2001). As for tone, the default tone has the smallest f0 range and the falling tone has the largest f0 range. Falling tone is realized entirely on the stressed syllable whereas for the rising tone, the phenomenon of peak delay is observed unless tone occurs on a w...