Stress and accent: acoustic correlates of metrical prominence in Catalan

This study examines the phonetic correlates of stress and accent in Catalan, analyzing syllable duration, spectral balance, vowel quality, and overall intensity in two stress [stressed, unstressed] and in two accent conditions [accented, unaccented]. Catalan reveals systematic phonetic differences between accent and stress, consistent with previous work on Dutch, English, and Spanish (Slujter & van Heuven 1996a, 1996b; Campbell & Beckman 1997, Ortega-Llebaría & Prieto 2006). Duration, spectral balance, and vowel quality are reliable acoustic correlates of stress, while accent is acoustically marked by overall intensity and pitch. Duration, at least in Catalan, is not a reliable indicator of accent since accentual lengthening was found only in speakers who produced some accents with a wider pitch range. Introduction The search for consistent acoustic correlates of metrical prominence is complicated by the fact that stress and accent interact, since only stressed syllables can be accented. Some studies claim that stress does not have any phonetic reality and that only knowledge of the language allows listeners to distinguish minimal pairs such as ‘pérmit’ and ‘permít’. According to this view (Bolinger 1958, Fry 1958), the main correlate of stress is pitch movement and, in the absence of pitch, nothing in the speech signal indicates where stress is. According to the alternative view (Halliday 1967, Vanderslice & Ladefoged 1972), metrical prominence consists of two categories with two conditions each, which ranked from lower to higher yield the following hierarchy: [-stressed, -accented] > [+stressed, -accented] > [+stressed, +accented]. Stress would then have separate phonetic correlates, although they strongly interact with those of accent. Recent experimental work on stress and accent has had contradictory results. Slujter & van Heuven (1996a, 1996b) modelled metrical prominence as a twodimensional scale with two categories in each dimension (accent and stress). They found that differences in duration (stressed syllables are longer) and in spectral balance (stressed syllables show an increase in intensity that affects