1.

2 Stress
Topic:–
‒ Definition
‒ Characteristics of stressed syllables, level and types of stress
‒ Stressed timed and syllable timed languages
‒ Level stress, crescendo stress, diminuendo stress, crescendo-diminuendo stress, word
stress, bound stress phonemic stress, morphological stress, sentence stress, primary stress,
contrastive stress, emphatic stress

Suprasegmental refers to properties of an utterance which are not properties of any single
segment
Suprasegmental properties include:
 stress
 tone
 intonation
 length
 organization of segments into syllables

STRESS
Definition
Jones (1950), defined stress syllable as one that speaker consciously utters with greater effort
than other neighboring syllables in the word or sentence.
When stress is defined from a listener’s standpoint, the claim is often made that stressed syllables
are louder than unstressed syllables (Bloomfield, 1993).

Stress

Physiological/ Psycho-acoustical/
Production Perception

Articulatory or motor side of speech A feature of the sounds perceived by listeners

Sweet (1878) – stress is the comparative

force with which the separate syllables of
a sound group are pronounced Trager and smith (1951) – stress is assumed to
Fanagy (1966) – considers stress as the be manifested by loudness, each level being
function of great speaking effort louder than the next lower level
Physiological mechanism involved in stress
Ultimately, differences in stress are to differences in physical effort. The effort is reflected
directly in the activity of the muscles involved in respiration and indirectly in subglottal pressure.
A great deal of information regarding the relationship between respiration activity and stress
derives from electromyographic and related studies. The direct evidences are obtained from the
means of electromyography (Fromkin and Ladefoged, 1966).

The force exerted by the muscles is transmitted to the air in the lungs and is reflected in the sub
glottal pressure.

If the linguistic stress is indeed connected with increased effort, differences in the stress should
be reflected in changes of subglottal pressure.

Electromyographic studies of the activity of the internal intercostals during the repetition of a
single stressed syllable show first, that there is a general increase in the amount of muscular
activity as the utterance proceeds, and second, that the muscular activity occurs mainly in bursts
that immediately precede each syllable.

However, when speakers were instructed to emphasize several noncontiguous words in a longer
sentence, they did not consistently produce a peak in the subglottal air pressure function for the
each emphasized words.

Types of stress – Traditional phonetics (Saran, 1907)

• Stress classification based listener point of view
• Dynamic/ Expiratory - Speech
• Music/Melodic – Music

Assumption: stress and pitch are independent of each other.

Jones (1950) (Serbo-Croatian a tonal language)

However as Serbo-Croatian is a tonal language, he might be referring to tones rather than stress.

Domain of stress
• Phonemic or Word level
• Sentence level
Stress itself serves to divide the speech chain into units and therefore, Stress has an organizing or
articulating function

Word level stress

Domain of stress – word
Stress placement – syllable
If the word is a single syllable stress can’t be identified
Hence minimal unit for contrastive stress placement – sequence of two syllables

Three types of word level stress

Free stress
Bound stress
Morphological stress.

Free stress
• If the placement of stress is not predictable by morphological, lexical or syntactic criteria.
Here the stress occupies an independent position
Russian and English
Morphological – Stress on a morpheme
e.g. Colleges
College + Plural morpheme
Lexical – Stress on a lexical category
e.g. Green house
Syntactic – On syntactic markers
e.g. Boys and girls of II M. Sc. are here.
If not predictable by morphological, lexical or syntactic criteria, stress occupies independent
position. This is termed as PHONEMIC OR FREE STRESS. Shifting the stress changes the
meaning. E. g. English.
PERvert vs perVERT (NOUN VS Verb)
INcline vs inCLINE
CONflict vs conFLICT

Bound stress
In a no. of languages placement of stress is fixed. For e.g.
Czech - stress on 1st syllable
Polish – stress on penultimate syllable
French – stress on last syllable
Placing stress on a different syllable changes word to a non-word.

Morphological stress
Intermediate between free and bound stress.
Position of stress is fixed with regard to a morpheme but not with regard to word boundaries Eg.
German (compound words)
Ubersetzen – to translate
Ubersetzen – to take across

SENTENCE LEVEL STRESS

When stress functions at a sentence level it doesn't change meaning of any lexical item but
increases the relative prominence of one of the lexical items.
3 types – Primary
Contrastive
Emphatic

Primary stress: An important word or syllable in a sentence is stressed.

e.g. PG students are attending the class.

Contrastive stress: This occurs in a sequence of sentences with parallel constituents that are
filled with different morphemes. Contrastive stress is used to distinguish a particular morpheme
from other morpheme that may occur in the same position.
E.g. Bring the red book.
Bring the blue book.

Functions of stress
Perceptual – Segmenting words
Syntactical – to differentiate different sentence type
Lexical – Help differentiate verbs and nouns
Pragmatic – Distinguish topic and content
Eg. Jack hit peter.
Jack hit peter.

Perceptual
Cues of stress

Acoustic
Perceptual cues includes
Loudness
Pitch prominence
Lengthening
Differs from one language to another.
Eg. English – Pitch prominence
Swedish & Kannada – Lengthening
 • Smith (1951) – loudness is major factor in the perception of stress
• Fant (1957) – lengthening of syllables most obvious physical correlate of stress
• Bolinger (1958) – pitch prominence is the primary cue
• Fry (1958) – duration is the most important cue
• Lieberman (1960) – peak amplitude reliable correlate of stress

Stress – loudness
Perception of stress - often correlated with perception of loudness.
Smallest amount of pressure that produces an acoustic sound is 0.002 dynes/cm2.
Loudness depends on
(a) F0
(b) The spectral characteristics of the sound and
(c) Its duration.

Loudness depends on F0

The different sensitivity of the ear to different frequencies forms the basis of the dependence of
loudness on frequency.
Two sounds of equal intensity, but different frequency may sound different in loudness.
Loudness level of a tone - the intensity of a 1000 Hz tone that sounds equal in loudness of the
given tone. The unit of loudness level is phon.

A pure tone of 1000 Hz, at an intensity level of 40 decibels, has a loudness level of 40 phons.

Loudness depends on spectral characteristics of a sound

a) Phon scale - rank sensations in order of increasing magnitude.
b) Does not express numerical relations between the measured sensations.
c) Numerical scale of loudness - sone scale.
d) One sone - a 1000 Hz tone at an intensity level of 40 decibels above threshold
e) Two sones twice as loud as one-sone sound.
f) Loudness of a complex sound = the sum of the loudnesses of the several components.
Therefore, loudness of a complex sound depends upon its spectral characteristics

Loudness also depends upon duration.

Short sounds - less intense than long sounds.
Short burst of noise must be more intense in order to be equal in effectiveness to a longer noise
(Miller, 1948).
Loudness of an intense noise, however, depends upon its duration up to durations of only 65 ms.
Acoustic cues
Increased F0
Increased intensity
Lengthened duration
Change in vowel quality
Acoustically intensity alone can’t be considered to correlate with stress.
Vowel has its own intrinsic intensity

(2) Interaction between F0 and formant frequency.

If harmonic coincides with one of the lower formants amplitude of a sound increases as much as
5-6 dB.
e.g. F0 300 Hz, F1 300 Hz

(3) Transition effects

High vowel is followed by dental or alveolar consonants - Higher intensity.
Studies denoting the markers of the stress:
Author Language Subjects Cues

Stetson (1951) English Vowel quantity

Fry (1966) English 10 Duration and intensity

Bolinger (1958) English - Pitch prominence and duration

Fry (1958) English - Duration, intensity and pitch prominence

Jassem(1959) Polish - Frequency

Tiffany (1959) American English Vowel diagram is larger for stressed syllables

Lieberman (1960) American English 16 Higher F0. peak amplitude, longer duration

Author Language Subject Cues

s

Jassem et al. Polish Fo variations and duration

(1968)

Lehiste Estonian Duration

(1968a)

Savithri Kannada 4 F0, duration, intensity and F2

(1987)

Savithri Kannada 4 duration and intensity changes

(1987)

Savithri, Kannada 50 F0, intensity and duration were significantly

Rohini & Sai (Perception study) higher (40 Hz, 4 r dB, and 136 )
Ram (2006)

Development of stress
Two hypotheses regarding child’s initial state
Neural start hypothesis (Leopold, 1947)
Initially no stress preference. (level stress)
As the child grows stress habits of community develop.
Allen & Hawkins (1977, 79, 80) Children have a natural bias towards producing words with
trochiac rhythm (stressed syllable followed by unstressed syllable)
Studies
Brown (1973) observed contrastive stress development in one of his subjects below the age of
two years
• That papa nose
• That eva nose
Allen and Hawkins (1980) – 3 types of syllables: nuclear (stressed), non-nuclear accented and
unaccented syllables. Assignment of stress to each syllable by evaluator suggested that- Stress
pattern of 3 year olds resembled adult pattern

Hornby and Hass (1970) – 4-year olds used contrastive stress

20children, 24 drawings, describe pictures, record responses children described contrastive
elements with stress.