Levels of stress are not only distinguished by varying fundamental frequency contours but also by changes of supralaryngeal parameters, e.g. unstressed syllables exhibit reduced movement amplitudes and durations compared to stressed syllables. To investigate the effect of deaccentuation on apical gestures in /tVt/ sequences with all vowels of German we recorded lingual movements of five speaker...

The reduction of the six Bulgarian vowels (i, ɛ, a, ɜ, ɔ, u) to a fouror (in some dialects) three-vowel subsystem (i, (ɜ), ɜ, u) in unstressed syllables is generally accepted. But a number of studies disagree on the exact nature of the reduction process. Claims differ as to whether or not /a/ merges phonetically with /ɜ/, and /ɔ/ with /u/, or whether the assumed neutralized oppositions take a p...

The reduction of the six Bulgarian vowels (i, , a, , , u) to a fouror (in some dialects) three-vowel subsystem (i, ( ), , u) in unstressed syllables is generally accepted. But a number of studies disagree on the exact nature of the reduction process. Claims differ as to whether or not /a/ merges phonetically with / /, and / / with /u/, or whether the assumed neutralized oppositions take a phone...

To improve more effectively the learners’ proficiency to control contrast of the stressed to the unstressed in English teaching, it is necessary to analyze how the acoustical characteristics of learners' speech are related to the perceptual evaluation by teachers. This paper analyzes A) learner characteristics of durations measured in speech units related to stress, which are stressed and unstr...

English rhythm is related to contrast between the stressed and the unstressed in duration structure. In native English speech, in general, an intra-speaker average duration of stressed syllable is longer than that of syllable as a whole. On the contrary, that of unstressed syllable is shorter than that of syllable as a whole. In the previous paper by the present author, it was reported that str...

Punarnavine (20 and 40 mg/kg) and fluoxetine (20 mg/kg) per se administered orally for 14 successive days significantly decreased immobility periods of both unstressed and stressed mice in forced swim test. These drugs also significantly decreased sucrose preference in both stressed and unstressed mice as compared to their respective controls, indicating significant antidepressant-like activity...

Recently, an increasing attention has been paid to Mandarin word stress which is important for improving the naturalness of speech synthesis. Most of the research on Mandarin speech synthesis focuses on three stress levels: stressed, regular and unstressed. This paper emphasizes the unstressed syllable prediction because the unstressed syllable is also important to the intelligibility of the sy...

In a syllable monitoring experiment, Greek and English speakers (N = 20 per language) monitored for [ma] embedded in Greek real and nonce words; [ma] was word-initial, word-medial or word-final, and stressed, unstressed or rhythmically stressed. Both groups spotted stressed [ma] faster than unstressed [ma]; unstressed [ma] was spotted faster by Greek than English participants. Rhythmically stre...

This paper reports two experiments that examine unstressed vowel reduction and neutralisation in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian. Stress-dependent F1 and F2 frequency variation was measured for the central and back vowel pairs in careful speech. The results reveal a less unequivocal picture of the pairwise convergence of formant frequencies than has previously been reported: the data confirm a ...