Acoustic correlates of prominence in Besemah (Malayic, Indonesia)

Abstract

This paper examines the acoustic realization of word-level stress and phrase-level prominence (i.e., pitch-accents, boundary tones) in Besemah, a little-described Malayic language of southwest Sumatra, Indonesia. There has been much disagreement over the status of word-level stress in the languages of western Indonesia, particularly with regards to well-known varieties of Malay (i.e., Standard Malay-Indonesian). Utilizing acoustic cues, word-level stress has been claimed to be present by some (e.g., Adisasmito-Smith & Cohn 1996), though studies involving perception experiments have questioned this position (e.g., van Zanten & van Heuven 2004). All of these studies, however, are complicated by significant influence from substrate languages like Javanese, which apparently lack word-level stress (Goedemans & van Zanten 2007). As a follow up to McDonnell (forthcoming), which found that word-level stress in Besemah falls on the final syllable of the word and is cued by increased intensity, the present study reports the results of a more complex sentence completion task where six speakers of Besemah (3 male, 3 female) uttered target words in different frames that vary along two dimensions: [±focus] and [±final position in utterance]. The study aims to show the acoustic correlates of prominence in Besemah, teasing apart word-level stress, pitch-accent, and boundary tones.