Acoustic correlates of perceived stress in an isolated synthetic disyllable

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Abstract
In production, syllables that are stressed differ from those that are unstressed on at least four well‐known acoustic parameters—duration, pitch, amplitude, and spectral reduction of the vowel. In order to determine how these parameters interact in perception of stress a disyllabic nonsense word—/bapbap/—was synthesized on the Haskins Laboratories OVEIII speech synthesizer. Four series were constructed in which one of the two syllables was systematically shortened, reduced, or lowered in steady state pitch or steady state amplitude. Linguistically sophisticated listeners were able to hear stable and reliable differences in stress only when duration was manipulated. Since duration seemed to be the critical parameter, naive subjects listened to the duration series under two conditions. In the duration judgment condition, listeners were asked to judge whether the first or second syllable sounded longer, while in the stress judgement condition they were asked whether the disyllable sounded more like PERmit or perMIT. Subsequent experiments tested the influence of small changes in one of the two syllables along each of the other three acoustic parameters upon the stress and duration boundaries found when only duration was manipulated. The results relate to how acoustic events convey articulatory effort. [Work supported by NINCDS.]

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