Effects of Syllable Position, Fundamental Frequency, Duration and Amplitude on Word Stress in Mandarin Chinese
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Effects of Syllable Position, Fundamental Frequency, Duration and Amplitude on Word Stress in Mandarin Chinese Vickie Y. Yu1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study examined the importance of syllable position, duration, and tone/pitch for the assignment of stress in Chinese hums. Twenty native Mandarin speakers and 20 native English speakers were asked to assign primary stress to two-syllable Chinese hums. The importance of acoustic cues for stress assignment was also evaluated. Our findings indicate that syllable position plays the most prominent role in stress assignment. Native Chinese listeners preferred to assign stress to final syllables whereas native English listeners preferred to assign stress to initial syllables. Both language groups were sensitive to different acoustic cues in assigning stress. The effects of complex interactions of syllable position, tone, duration and intensity on stress assignment in Chinese hums for both language groups support the hypothesis that linguistic experience affects speech perception at the suprasegmental level. Keywords Word stress · Speech perception · Suprasegmental processing · Chinese tone · Acoustic properties · Linguistic experience
Introduction English uses stress to make lexical distinction. Stress refers to “the greater prominence or loudness that a vowel or syllable exhibits within a word. Those that are perceived as relatively more prominent than others are said to be stressed. According to Fry (1958), stress is the result of the interaction of pitch, intensity, and duration. A stressed syllable is often louder and longer than an unstressed syllable. Stress gives a certain basic prominence to the syllables, and hence to the words. In Mandarin Chinese, word stress is usually considered less salient than in English because Chinese is a tone language. Although some linguists consider Chinese to lack stress (Hyman 1977; Selkiirk and Shen 1990), the consensus of linguistic theories (e.g., Chao 1979; Chen 2000; Duanmu 2000, 2004a, 2004b; Hoa 1983) and phonetic studies (e.g., Lin et al. 1984; Yan and Lin 1988; Wang and Wang 1993) have indicated Chinese does inherit the property of word stress. However, among * Vickie Y. Yu [email protected] 1
Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences, California State University, Northridge, CA, USA
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
these linguistic theories, the positional tendency (direction of syllable stress in Chinese words has not yielded a consistent conclusion. Some linguistic theories report initial syllable stress in Chinese words (e.g., Duanmu 2000, 2004a, 2004b) whereas others propose final syllable stress (e.g., Chao 1979; Chen 2000; Hoa 1983). The final syllable stress theory is based on consistent evidence from several phonetic studies (e.g., Lin et al. 1984; Yan and Lin 1988), wherein native listeners tend to perceive the final syllable to be the longest in two- and three-syllable Chinese words and that they are more li
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