There are numerous studies devoted to the typological examination of stress (e.g. Hyman 1977, Liberman & Prince 1977, Hayes 1980, 1995, Prince 1983, Halle & Vergnaud 1987, Goedemans and van der Hulst 1996, Elenbaas & Kager 1999, Gordon 2002, Hyde 2002, Heinz 2009, van der Hulst & Goedemans 2009, van der Hulst et al 2010). This research program has produced many interesting observations and theo...

This study investigates the relationship between variation due to prosodic prominence and variation due to sound change. We compare two hypotheses: under prominence vowels move in the direction of vowel shift, and under prominence vowels are hyperarticulated, and move to positions more peripheral in the vowel space. These hypotheses make competing predictions for two vowels currently undergoing...

Recent work has proposed that prominence perception in speech could be driven by predictability of prosodic patterns, connecting prominence perception to the concept of statistical learning. In the present study, we tested the predictability hypothesis by conducting a listening test where subjects were first exposed to a 5-minute stream of sentences with a certain proportion of sentence-final w...

Past studies have shown that a native Spanish speaker’s use of phrasal prominence is a good indicator of her level of English prosody acquisition. Because of the cross-linguistic differences in the organization of phrasal prominence and durational contrasts, we hypothesize that those speakers with English-like prominence in their L2 speech are also expected to have acquired English-like rhythm....

We explored a database covering seven dialects of British and Irish English and three different styles of speech to find acoustic correlates of prominence. We built classifiers, trained the classifiers on human prominence/nonprominence judgments, and then evaluated how well they behaved. The classifiers operate on 452 ms windows centered on syllables, using different acoustic measures. By compa...

Acoustic and articulatory measurements were made of utterances containing seven syllables using the vowel /aI/ with varying degrees of prominence, including contrastive emphasis/focus. A trained phonetician judged the amount of prominence for each of the seven syllables. The findings show a significant correlation between amount of jaw opening for each of the target syllables and perceived prom...

Topographic prominence can be defined as the perceived difference in height between an individual and their surroundings within a defined neighborhood. Because this difference can be seen as an element of visual/political control, topographic prominence may provide clues to perceived social hierarchy and rank. This study uses ARC/GRID to discover topographic prominence in a landscape at a varie...