Word Stress Research Articles

‘INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF MISPLACEMENT STRESS ON CHANGING SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES OF WORDS (A CASE STUDY OF ALBAHA UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AT TERTIARY LEVEL - FACULTY OF SCIENCE AND ARTS - ALMANDAQ)’

The purpose of this study is to look into the effect of misplacement stress on changing syntactic categories of words used by Albaha University students at the Faculty of Science and Arts – Almandaq at the tertiary level. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the effects of misplaced stress on the syntactic categories of words (verbs and nouns). To get and process the gathered data, a descriptive qualitative method is used. The study's population is third-year English department students' for the academic year 2021–2022. In the first semester, the students take a phonology course, which is beneficial to our study. The study's sample included 20 male students. The researcher designed an oral recorded test and a written test to collect the data. To measure the acoustic properties of English words for the oral recorded test, the data was analyzed using "Praat soft wave." For the written test, the SPSS program was used. The findings revealed a clear deficiency in the students' ability to manage stress effectively. This failure attributed to a lack of knowledge about stress placement and its effect on syntactic category. Furthermore, students do not get enough practice and feedback on stress placement while speaking and reading activities.
 Keywords: Stress Placement, Word Stress, Syntactic Category, Albaha University Students.

The intonation of Persian polar questions

Statements and questions in Persian are distinguished not only by morpho-syntactic but also by intonational means. This paper studies how questions are signaled intonationally in utterances that have no morpho-syntactic cues. A production experiment was designed that systematically manipulated sentence mode as well as the within-word position of stress in the target words in pre-nuclear and nuclear accentual positions. Our results showed that H pre-nuclear and nuclear peaks are higher and located earlier in question than statement utterances. Also, the rise to a F0 peak as well as the following fall in the pre-nuclear and nuclear accentual positions are shorter and steeper in the question contour. The data further revealed that the exact phonetic realization of pre-nuclear and nuclear accentual rises and falls depended on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets in the different word stress conditions we set up. Our findings readily lend themselves to an auto-segmental approach to intonational phonology which treats tunes as strings of independent categorically distinct tonal units associated with specific elements in the segmental structure.

FUNCTIONS, PLACEMENT AND DEGREES OF WORD STRESS

FUNCTIONS, PLACEMENT AND DEGREES OF WORD STRESS

Echoing Retorts in Hárbarðsljóð and Lokasenna

Echoing Retorts in <i>Hárbarðsljóð</i> and <i>Lokasenna</i>

The impact of incidental learning on the acquisition of the sound /p/ by Arabic-speaking EFL learners

Abstract The effect of incidental learning on acquiring the pronunciation of the phoneme /p/ by Arabic-speaking English as foreign language learners was the focus of this study. This phoneme was chosen because it does not exist in the phonemic inventory of Arabic. Eighth graders studying at Al-Ethra’a Secondary School in Alkarak were tested on the pronunciation of words containing /p/ in context (pre-test). For three weeks, they were taught the primary stress of English words containing the target phoneme in their first or second syllable (treatment/incidental learning). The learning exercises consisted of explaining the stress rules and listening to native speakers uttering the words, followed by the participants’ repetition. The students were then re-tested (post-test) to determine whether incidental learning had affected the participants’ pronunciation of /p/. The results reveal that the treatment (incidental learning of /p/) had a positive impact on the participants’ answers on the post-test.

Perceptual training enhances Seoul Korean listeners’ use of vowel quality and pitch cues to English lexical stress

This study investigates whether high-variability (multi-talker) perceptual training is superior to low-variability (single-talker) perceptual training for enhancing Seoul-Korean listeners’ use of vowel quality and pitch cues to English lexical stress. Vowel quality and pitch are the two most important cues to English lexical stress in accented words (Tremblay et al., 2021). Seoul Korean does not have lexical stress, lexical pitch accents, or lexical tones. Seoul-Korean listeners completed a pre-/post-test sequence-recall experiment where they heard and recalled four English words uttered by different talkers. Experimental conditions: The words differed in lexical stress, which was cued by: (i) vowel quality, pitch, and duration; (ii) vowel quality and duration; (iii) pitch and duration; or (iv) duration. Control condition: The words differed in their initial consonant (Seoul-Korean contrast). Listeners completed one of two training types (8 × 30-mins). The words in the training followed a cue distribution that mimicked naturalistic spoken English (Im et al., 2018). Results: Both training types improved listeners’ recall for (i)–(iii), suggesting enhanced use of vowel quality and pitch. Learning gains were greater with high-variability training, but training type did not interact with cue. Thus, high variability provides a global rather than selective enhancement of listeners’ use of cues to lexical stress.

An Investigation of Common Stress Placement Errors in English Word Roots and their Suffixed Derivatives by Arabic-Speaking EFL Learners

Suffixation influences lexical stress in one of three ways. A suffix attached to a word root/stem may take the stress itself, or it may cause it to move from where it was in the uninflected stem to another syllable, or it may keep stress as is. Stress misassignment is very common in the speech of Arabic-speaking English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. This study was conducted to investigate how Arabic-speaking EFL learners at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University (PSAU) in Saudi Arabia assign lexical stress in word roots/stems and their suffixed derivatives to find out whether stress in suffixed words presented a greater challenge to the learners than stress in the stem; the study also aimed to examine whether errors in stress assignment were caused by first language(L1) interference. 112 students from PSAU were randomly chosen to pronounce 80 suffixed words as well as their roots/stems. The pronunciations were recorded, and the recordings were analyzed by the three researchers and three raters. The study concluded that suffixed words do not present a more significant stress assignment challenge than uninflected stems, the type of syllable attached to a word is not as important as the number of syllables, syllable weight and structure in a word, and that L1 influence may be one of the causes but not the only cause of lexical stress misassignment.

STRESS IN ENGLISH

Many learners of English as a second language face a big problem in specifying stress of words. The present study aims at shedding some light on these important issues of word stress. Stress is usually associated with loudness or force, the force of a syllable or an utterance. The study has three sections and a conclusion.&#x0D; In the first section, definitions of stress, stress as a phoneme, the relationship between word stress and sentence stress, the relationship among stress and other suprasegmentals, and degrees of stress are studied. A presentation of stress predictability of monosyllabic and bisyllabic nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs is the content of the second section. Section three deals with the relationship between morphology and phonology as far as stress is concerned.&#x0D; The present study is primarily restricted to deal with word stress. Sentence stress needs a sophisticated analysis of other suprasegmentals like pitch and intonation. Examples are all authentic, and they are presented as in the original references. Also, we try to restrict our treatment and transcription to the Broad British Transcription (BBT) or Phonemic Transcription (PT), unless the discussion needs some reference to the American Transcription (AT).

Syllables and Stress Assignment in Najdi Arabic

The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed and unified analysis of word stress in Najdi Arabic (NA), a variety of Arabic spoken in Najd, located in the central region of Saudi Arabia. Regular stress, seemingly exceptional cases, and also variations within NA itself are all accounted for in a simple and straightforward manner. The proposed analysis is based on two principles. First, unlike previous studies that employ a three-way weight distinction between light, heavy, and superheavy syllables, a binary weight distinction between light (monomoraic) C(C)v; and heavy (bimoraic) C(C)vX(C) is proposed, where “X” is either a vowel or a consonant. Second, word-final consonants are crucially assumed to be “extrasyllabic”. The stress algorithm is constrained so that stress may fall on one of the last three syllables of a word, as follows: Stress the rightmost heavy syllable if and only if it is one of the word’s last three syllables; otherwise stress the antepenultimate syllable (initial syllable in disyllabic words). Variations within NA and seemingly exceptional cases are accounted for by the fact that stress assignment applies earlier in the derivation before the application of any other phonological processes that subsequently alter the shape of the word.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of the English Prosodic Phonology Processing Test (EPPPT): A Multi-Trait Multimethod Approach

Most of the prosody perception tests do not capture how listeners perceive and interpret stress, tone, and intonation in the process of listening comprehension. The current study developed the English Prosodic Phonology Processing Test (EPPPT). A sample of 240 Luo speaking high school students were tested using Confirmatory Factory Analysis (CFA) in a multi-trait multimethod matrix. Four traits were measured including word prosody, sentence prosody, juncture, and discourse prosody. Three methods were used including the picture selection task, stress assignment task, and chunking task. CFA confirmed the current taxonomy of the diverse traits of English prosodic phonology: word stress, sentence stress, open and closed junctures, and discourse. The methods yielded statistically significant differences among the discriminant validity of these traits. The model fit was better when the different prosodic traits were specified (convergent validity), while the methods of testing yielded distinguishable, unique types of information about prosodic phonology processing. Using a battery of five tests, the results of EPPPT showed that the traits are quite independent of each other and the method effect is not significant.&#x0D; Keywords: reliability, validity, EPPPT, Prosody, MTMM

Strategic perceptual weighting of acoustic cues for word stress in listeners with cochlear implants, acoustic hearing, or simulated bimodal hearing.

Perception of word stress is an important aspect of recognizing speech, guiding the listener toward candidate words based on the perceived stress pattern. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing is likely to disrupt some of the available cues for word stress, particularly vowel quality and pitch contour changes. In this study, we used a cue weighting paradigm to investigate differences in stress cue weighting patterns between participants listening with CIs and those with normal hearing (NH). We found that participants with CIs gave less weight to frequency-based pitch and vowel quality cues than NH listeners but compensated by upweighting vowel duration and intensity cues. Nonetheless, CI listeners' stress judgments were also significantly influenced by vowel quality and pitch, and they modulated their usage of these cues depending on the specific word pair in a manner similar to NH participants. In a series of separate online experiments with NH listeners, we simulated aspects of bimodal hearing by combining low-pass filtered speech with a vocoded signal. In these conditions, participants upweighted pitch and vowel quality cues relative to a fully vocoded control condition, suggesting that bimodal listening holds promise for restoring the stress cue weighting patterns exhibited by listeners with NH.

Latin Accentual Clausula as Exemplified in 14th-Century Prose Texts by Dante and Boccaccio

This paper studies 14th-century Latin prose rhythm as exemplified by Dante and Boccaccio. The texts observed in this analysis are samples from De Monarchia, De vulgari eloquentia, Quaestio de aqua et terra and Epistole by Dante and De mulieribus claris and De casibus virorum illustrium by Boccaccio. In ancient rhetoric, rhythmical units were used at the ends of sentences and clauses in prose texts. These units were called clausulae, and the rhythm of classical prose was based on the quantity of syllables. Medieval Latin prose rhythm, however, was based on word stress and was called cursus. The aim of this paper is to study what kinds of cursus occur in the given text samples and their frequency. The research method used in this paper is comparative-statistical analysis. The distribution of cursus in these samples is also analysed by chapters and different types of cursus are distinguished.

Phonetic Cues in Auditory Identification of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian Language of Origin.

This work presents the results of an auditory language of origin identification experiment. Disyllabic and trisyllabic logatomes were recorded by speakers of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian, and presented to L1 speakers of the abovementioned Slavic languages. The goals of the test were to verify the ability of lay listeners to recognize the linguistic origin of speakers, based on spoken samples with limited segmental and suprasegmental information, and to correlate the signal features with the subjects' performance. It was found that position of word stress is not an important predictor in language recognition. However, inherent vowel characteristics such as duration and vowel space computed by the means of Pillai scores correlate with subjects' performance. Both the linguistic profile and the familiarity with closely related languages also appear to be relevant predictors of listeners' performance. Finally, the information-theoretic notion of surprisal applied on regular cross-linguistic sound correspondences was correlated with recognition scores; though, the correlations did not reach the threshold of statistical significance. We conclude that auditory identification of linguistic origin by lay persons, native speakers of closely related languages, is possible even when exposed to limited segmental information, which can serve as a cue in the identification of linguistic origin.

Complexity resolved: profile of a Slovenian child with protracted phonological development over an intervention period

ABSTRACT This paper describes the complex phonological patterns of one Slovenian-speaking girl with protracted phonological development who received phonological intervention. At 4;6, the child’s word length, stress and vowels were age-level, but she showed reduced match levels (accuracy) for syllable structure and consonants. Unusual constraints on word position and sequences, particularly concerning fricatives and stops, resulted in many assimilations, reduplications and metatheses. Addressing these constraints in the first intervention period (to 4;9) led to higher overall accuracy and a transition from less typical to more typical mismatches (“errors”), e.g., sibilant grooving (stridency) and rhotic production as singletons and in clusters. The profile focuses on that initial pre- and post-treatment period, giving a brief overview of the follow-up intervention and outcomes and reflecting on implications for future research and clinical practice. 1 1 The abstract is available in Slovenian language (see Supplementary material).

A Polish five-year-old with protracted phonological development

ABSTRACT This case study examines the phonology of a five-year-old Polish-speaking boy with protracted phonological development. A multi-tier analysis of his phonology revealed that word length, stress patterns, vowels and most consonants were largely compatible with the adult target while coronal consonants requiring fine control of tongue shape (fricatives, affricates, liquids) and most consonant clusters posed difficulty for the child in all word positions. Labial and dorsal features were well-established; in fact, [Labial] outcompeted other places of articulation in problematic sequences of both singletons and clusters. The case profile demonstrates asynchronous development of individual phonological elements and tiers. A proposed treatment plan exploits the child’s strengths to address his needs and minimise the discrepancy between the tiers.

How weak are Romanian clitic pronouns?

In traditional linguistics, pronouns are divided into two classes: those that can bear word stress, coined “strong”, “full” or “tonal”, and those that cannot, coined “weak”, “clitic”, or “atonal”. However, in the last decades, research on this topic has shown that items generally labeled as clitics are far more complex. Somewhere between words and affixes, these hybrid linguistic entities challenge both description and modeling. As for Romanian, the debate on weak (i.e., clitic) pronouns has been dominated by the question of their categorial status: are these items clitics or affixes? In this article, I present and scrutinize different approaches that support the claim that there are differences between proclitics and enclitics, i.e., between clitics occurring before vs. after the verb; this includes not only positional, but also featural differences. I identify various types of ambiguities in Romanian that could lead to improper data interpretation, and, based on an analysis of syllabicity – the most salient feature of Romanian weak pronouns – I refute claims for treating clitics in preverbal position differently than in postverbal position. Furthermore, using evidence from both historical data and data pertaining to language varieties, I show regularities in the Romanian weak pronoun system, bringing evidence against the claim that Romanian weak pronouns show a great deal of idiosyncrasies.

Analisis Kesulitan Pelafalan Kosakata Bahasa Inggris Siswa Kelas V SDN Pondok Makmur

The importance of English to be learned in this era of globalization, it would be better if English is taught early on. The earlier you get to know a foreign language, the easier it is to develop your skills. The focus of this research is some students who have difficulty pronouncing English vocabulary in class V SDN Pondok Makmur. The purpose of this study was to describe the difficulty of pronouncing English vocabulary for the fifth grade students of SDN Pondok Makmur. The type of research method used is a type of qualitative descriptive analysis research method, namely the researcher will describe the difficulty of pronouncing English vocabulary for the fifth grade students of SDN Pondok Makmur, Tangerang City. Data collection techniques using tests, observations and documentation. Students found difficulty in pronouncing vocabulary from the results of this research test, there were errors of consonants as many as 4 words, vowels 3 words, intonation 10 words, and word stress 27 words. The most dominant errors are on word stress, second intonation, third consonants, and lastly on vowels.

French Semi-Vowels and Its Teaching for Chinese-Speaking Learners

The three French semi-vowels [j], [w], and [?] present challenges and noteworthy problems to Chinese-speaking learners of French. Despite the fact that few domestic studies are related with French semi-vowels and their inclusion in French textbooks, the uniqueness of semi-vowels has always revealed itself in the learning process of French pronunciation. This paper, focusing on semi-vowels in French, intends to elaborate the phonetic features of these semi-vowels; following that, an exploration of the reasons for the exception of words to the phonetic rules of semi-vowels is conducted from the perspective of etymology. Since these semi-vowels have vowel-like sounds but act like consonants, the performance of semi-vowels in some phonetic rules, such as syllabication, word stress, and the aspiration of voiceless stops, is analyzed. This study has implications for the teaching of semi-vowels in French.

Text-To-Speech Software for Promoting EFL Freshman Students’ Decoding Skills and Pronunciation Accuracy

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills and pronunciation proficiency. Then, both groups were exposed to the same in-class vocabulary and reading instruction. They covered the same lessons, skills, exercises, and tests. Since freshman students have problems in producing phonemes, consonant clusters, word stress and lack skill in associating written graphemes with their corresponding phonemes, read word by word and lack oral reading fluency, the experimental group used a text-to-speech (TTS) software called NaturalReader. Every week the students typed or copied and paste the lessons they took in class from the textbook into NaturalReader and practiced listening to the lessons read by the software. They could listen to the text as many times as they needed in the language lab or at home and could adjust the software reading speed. Every 4 weeks, experimental students took an oral reading and a vocabulary test and at the end of the semester (after 12 weeks), both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) posttest. Results showed significant differences between the experimental and control groups as a result of using the NaruralReader. Improvement was noted in the decoding skill enhancement, reading fluency and pronunciation accuracy but not in vocabulary knowledge. Results showed slow but gradual improvement. Significant improvement was noted after 8 and 12 weeks. There was a positive correlation between the number of lessons and texts practiced and weekly practice time and decoding and pronunciation proficiency posttest scores. The students reported positive attitudes towards practicing decoding and pronunciation via NaturalReader. Procedures, results and recommendations are given in detail.

Protracted phonological development of a Portuguese six-year-old from the perspective of nonlinear phonology

ABSTRACT 1 1 is also available in European Portuguese. As a contribution to a special issue with individual profiles in protracted phonological development (PPD), we present a European Portuguese-speaking six-year-old, “Vicente”. By age six years, Portuguese-learning children have generally mastered most of the phonology. However, Vicente showed severe persisting PPD, which was negatively impacting his general socialisation. Although word length and stress often matched the adult targets as did many consonants and vowels, consonants were restricted in distribution and sequences. Consonant clusters showed a particularly high proportion of reduction. A constraints-based nonlinear phonological analysis led to a proposed intervention plan to address needs across the phonological hierarchy in the context of his greater need for enhanced socialisation: starting with the more attainable new word positions and sequences for consonants in his inventory, before addressing a major need for new word structure (clusters) and minor needs for segmental development (additional coronals).