Abstract
Anacrusis is the tendency to produce one or more unstressed syllables at the beginning of an utterance in a language. Such syllables are often pronounced rapidly and strongly reduced in duration. Anacrusis has been reported extensively in music, while studies related to spoken language are sparse. This study aimed to analyze the occurrences of anacrusis in narrative speech of healthy Asian-Indian adults speaking English. This was carried out by perceptually identifying the intonation groups and to identify anacrustic and non-anacrustic occurrences with reference to the primary stress and to acoustically verify the presence of ‘anacrusis using the measure verage syllable duration index. Ten healthy Asian-Indian adults [5 males and 5 females] within the age range of 18-25 years, proficient in English, participated in the study. The task was to narrate on a topic (college life) for 1 minute. The samples were audio recorded and perceptually analyzed for primary stress. Further, the average syllable duration of each utterance was calculated. Results suggest that anacrusis was often noticed in the initial part of the intonation groups but there were few instances where the anacrustic segments occurred in the medial or final positions also. More identifications of primary stress were observed in the non-anacrustic utterances compared to the anacrustic utterances. Average syllable duration increased as the word position moved from first word position to the final word position in an intonation group suggesting the presence of anacrusis. The anacrustic and non-anacrustic segments in each intonation groups on an average exhibited a 1/3rd: 2/3rd representation.
Highlights
This paper addresses discourse from the perspective of temporal rhythm, rate and stress, which in turn contribute to a phenomenon called „Anacrusis‟
The preliminary data suggests that anacrusis was observed as a phenomenon in the narrative speech of all speakers
There seems to be a clear distribution pattern, in that when intonation groups were considered as basal units, the anacrustic and non-anacrustic segments in each intonation group on an average exhibited a 1/3rd: 2/3rd representation
Summary
Anacrusis is the tendency to produce one or more unstressed syllables at the beginning of an utterance in spoken language. Anacrusis is a feature predominantly appreciated in music where it constitutes the initial unstressed notes, described by Hermann as early as 1799 (as cited in Hermann, 1830). In connected speech, it is an important prosodic aspect in normal speech production and yet, investigations addressing the perceptual and acoustic characteristics and correlates are sparse in the literature. This study reports preliminary descriptive analysis of the feature from a perceptual and temporal standpoint in spoken utterances of adults
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