Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Thai

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Abstract

Acoustic correlates of stress [duration, fundamental frequency (Fo), and intensity] were investigated in a language (Thai) in which both duration and Fo are employed to signal lexical contrasts. Stimuli consisted of 25 pairs of segmentally/tonally identical, syntactically ambiguous sentences. The first member of each sentence pair contained a two-syllable noun-verb sequence exhibiting a strong-strong (--) stress pattern, the second member a two-syllable noun compound exhibiting a weak-strong (--) stress pattern. Measures were taken of five prosodic dimensions of the rhyme portion of the target syllable: duration, average Fo, Fo standard deviation, average intensity, and intensity standard deviation. Results of linear regression indicated that duration is the predominant cue in signaling the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables in Thai. Discriminant analysis showed a stress classification accuracy rate of over 99%. Findings are discussed in relation to the varying roles that Fo, intensity, and duration have in different languages given their phonological structure.

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