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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