Stress, tone and word prosody in Vietnamese compounds

Vietnamese compounds and phrasal constructions are investigated for phonetic correlates of lexical stress. Two series of experiments on the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Vietnamese compound words and their phrasal counterparts are reported here and in a companion paper (Nguyen & Ingram, this volume), involving paradigmatic (same position within a syntactic frame) and syntagmatic comparisons (between adjacent elements), on five likely acoustic correlates of stress or prominence (f0 range and contour, duration, intensity and spectral slope, vowel reduction). We conclude that Vietnamese has lexical stress as a phonetic tendency, but not as an active phonological contrast.