Perceiving the stress pattern of words in sentences

Abstract

The cues for hearing the stress pattern of a word may be different depending on whether the word occurs in isolation or in a sentence. Furthermore, even within a sentence, the relative importance of the cues depends upon where the word occurs in the sentence, and upon phrasal accent. For example, contrary to Fry's classic results with words in isolation, the pitch contour was useless as a cue for perceiving the stress pattern of a noun preceded by an accented adjective. The word's duration pattern proved a more robust cue than pitch for stress pattern perception; the word's amplitude contour was useless as a cue. These results derive from an experiment where listeners had to identify the stress pattern of bisyllabic nonsense words embedded in meaningful sentences. The listeners had only to choose between the nonsense words “MAma” and “maMA” (10 and 01 stress patterns, respectively) on the basis of the perceived stress pattern. The duration, fundamental frequency, amplitude and spectral features of the nonsense words were manipulated factorially via LPC analysis-synthesis to assess the relative importance of these acoustic features as cues for stress perception.