Acoustic correlates of stress in K'ekchi

Abstract

At the last meeting of the ASA it was shown that speakers of different languages have different biases with respect to the location of stress in a string of syllables of equal duration [A. Berinstein, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 63, S55A (1978)]. English speakers had a bias to locate stress on an initial syllable, K'ekchi a final syllable, while Spanish had no syllable bias. When the length of syllables was systematically varied it was possible to overcome the effect of the bias in English and obtain judgments which equated length with stress. This was clearly not the case for K'ekchi. The investigation has proceeded to establish the acoustic correlates of stress in K'ekchi by comparing stressed and unstressed syllables in a corpus of field recordings controlled for vowel quality, phonemic vowel length, and word length. Intensity, pitch, and duration have been measured and particular attention paid to the inter‐relationship of word final lengthening, phonemic length, and duration as a cue for stress. [Work supported by NIH.]