Correlats acústics de l'accent secundari en català

This study aims at examining the acoustic correlates of secondary stress in Catalan. First, we carried out a production experiment which compared measures of duration, F0 and amplitude of syllables with 4 types of purported prominence: (1) no stress (picà); (2) primary stress (píca); (3) rhythmic stress (pìcarésca); (4) secondary stress in compounds (pìcaférro). The results show that there are no robust acoustic correlates for secondary stresses, and that such vowels are not acoustically different from unstressed syllables. Secondly, a perception experiment carried out with the same groups of syllables demonstrates that hearers tend to perceive secondary stresses as syllables with no stress. Summing up, this article shows something that has been shown recently for languages such as Greek (Arvaniti 1994), Spanish (Prieto & van Santen 1996, Scharf et al. 1995, Díaz-Campos 2002), and Polish (Scharf et al. 1995), namely, while hearers tend to regularize rythm and hear rhythmic accents on alternating syllables, there is little physical evidence for this kind of stresses in connected speech (vg. Hayes 1995:30-31). On the other hand, the article confirms, against the traditional view, that first elements of compounds are unstressed in the phonetic level, regardless of the fact that vowels in these positions are not reduced (Mascaró 1983, Recasens 1993, among others). This contrasts with the behavior of –ment adverbs, which are generally pronounced with a pitch accent on the first element (cf. Section 2.2).