Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Konkani Language

Abstract

Stress is an extra effort put on a word or a syllable or a phrase to emphasize special meaning. The acoustic cues for stress include fundamental frequency, increased amplitude, lengthened duration and increased vowel quality. Thus cues vary depending on the languages. The acoustic correlates of stress in Konkani language is not well understood. Hence the present study attempted to investigate the acoustic correlates of stress in Konkani language. A total of 10 subjects in the age range of 18-40 years participated in the study. Ten naïve speakers of Konkani language were asked to speak two word phrases (adjective + noun) with and without stress on the adjectives. Praat software was used to extract peak f0, peak intensity and duration of the first word (adjective) in both the conditions. Independentt test was employed to compare the significance of differences of means between the stressed and unstressed conditions. The results revealed significant increase in word duration in stressed conditions when comparison to unstressed condition in all the speakers at p<0.001. The increase in duration in stressed conditions may be attributing towards the differences between long and short vowels in Konkani language.