Acoustic correlates of stress in Turkish Kabardian, by Matthew Gordon and Ayla Applebaum
Matthew Gordon and Ayla Applebaum
Department of Linguistics,
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Acoustic correlates of stress in Turkish Kabardian
Journal of the International Phonetic Association (2010) 40/1
Abstract
This paper reports results of an acoustic study of stress in the Turkish dialect of the Northwest Caucasian language, Kabardian. Primary stressed syllables were found to have consistently higher fundamental frequency and characteristically greater duration and intensity. No evidence was found for pretonic secondary stresses. Schwa and, to a lesser extent, /å/ were shown to undergo slight raising as their duration in unstressed syllables decreased. This gradient raising of schwa is due to coarticulatory overlap with adjacent consonants rather than a categorical shift in vowel quality. Considerations of articulatory effort rather than perceptual dispersion predict both the categorical alternation between stressed /a…/ and unstressed /å/ in Kabardian and the non-categorical raising of schwa and /å/ in unstressed syllables.
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