The Acoustic Realization of Prosodic Prominence in Polish: Word-level Stress and Phrase-level Accent
Published in 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, 2018
Recommended citation: Ćwiek, A., & Wagner, P. (2018). The Acoustic Realization of Prosodic Prominence in Polish: Word-level Stress and Phrase-level Accent. 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, 922–926. http://olacwiek.github.io/files/cwiek_2018_acoustic.pdf
This publication is based on my MA thesis, supervised by Petra Wagner and Zofia Malisz.
The current study addresses the question of how word-level (“stress”) and phrase- or sentence-level prominence (“accent”) is realized in Polish. For this purpose, a production experiment eliciting semi-spontaneous utterances was conducted, closely following the methodological approach introduced in [1]. Our acoustic analyses are based on identical target syllables which are embedded in sentences under conditions that allow to disentangle word-level and phrase-level prominence. The acoustic realizations of these target syllables are then subject to linear mixed-effect models fitted for various acoustic parameters: duration, fundamental frequency maximum, intensity, and spectral balance. The models indicate that prominence marking in Polish is realized acoustically in a stable fashion on phrase-level only. Word stress marking occurs only in cases where a lexically stressed syllable simultaneously realizes a phrase-level accent.