An acoustic study of Tetsǫ́t’ıné stress: Iambic stress in a quantity-sensitive tone language

Abstract This paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length four tones. In our study, we find that the primary correlate of is duration, whereas intensity plays secondary but statistically significant role. There was no effect on F0 results. We discuss results relation to several proposals regarding typology systems. Based Functional Load Hypothesis (Berinstein 1979) Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995, 2001), are some extent unexpected. suggest most consistent Iambic–Trochaic Law (Hayes 1995), which predicts systems prefer use duration as their correlate.