The supralaryngeal articulation of stress and accent in Greek

Abstract

It is well reported that articulatory movements comprising prominence units are longer, larger, and faster than their non-prominent counterparts. However, it is unclear whether these effects arise at the level of lexical stress, accent, or both, reflecting a hierarchy of prominence, i.e., being stronger when induced by accent as opposed to stress. It is also uncertain whether prominence-induced kinematic effects are invariant across positions of stress within the word, types of focus that accent denotes, and positions of words in the phrase. Here, we use an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study to assess the supralaryngeal kinematic correlates of prominence in Greek across three stress positions (antepenultimate, penultimate, ultimate; i.e., all possible stress positions in Greek), two accentual conditions (accented and de-accented), and two phrasal positions (phrase-medial and phrase-final). Focus type is also considered, with the accentual conditions coming from two types of focus (broad and narrow), while the de-accented conditions are by default unfocused. Our results indicate that stressed syllables involve longer, larger, and faster gestures than their unstressed counterparts, regardless of the position of stress within the word. Notably, variation in velocity is accounted for by variation in displacement. Presence of accent does not further expand the stressed gestures, although it is related to minimal kinematic changes across the whole word, the exact profile of which depends on stress position. With the exception of final vowel duration, focus type is not systematically encoded in these kinematic effects. Finally, interactions are detected between the kinematic profile of prominence and that of boundaries. Implications of our findings for the hierarchy of prominence and its cross-linguistic differences are discussed, and a gestural account of prominence and boundaries is put forward.