The status of lexical stress in understudied Kabyle Tamazight-Berber: “Acoustic evidence from Kabyle dominant speakers.”

Abstract

Until now, the classification of the prosodic systems of some languages (including Berber languages) is not conclusive and open to alternative interpretations. The question is: are these languages better classified as lacking stress or more controlled and systematic studies of these languages are needed? This study asks three main questions: (1) Is there lexical stress in Kabyle?, (2) what are the acoustic properties that manifest stress (if it turned out “it exists”)? and (3) which syllable in the word is prominent? Results from a closely controlled acoustic production study of 6 male Kabyle-native speakers, showed some evidence of lexical prominence in root words, which was manifested by intensity, duration (for vowel /æ/), and vowel quality (higher and more peripheral prominent syllable for /æ/ vowels). Louder, and higher and more peripheral vowels were observed in initial syllables while longer vowels (/æ/) were found in penultimate syllables. Surprisingly, based on the present data we did not see strong evidence of F0 being a meaningful correlate; however, we observed acoustic patterns consistent with an enhancement of the initial syllable corresponding to the focus condition, which led us to suggest that the pitch results looked like an intonational pitch accent that is location-sensitive. Implications and further work are discussed in the paper.