Acoustic Correlates of Emphasis in Tamil

Abstract

Stress, one of the prosodic features, refers to the degree of prominence of individual syllables of single words. The acoustic correlates of stress include fundamental frequency, duration and intensity, and their relative importance in each language is language specific. Though many authors have studied stress correlates in Tamil (Andronov, 1973; Asher, 1985; Balasubramanian, 1981; Christdas, 1988; Nagarajan, 1994), they are still highly debated because of contradictory results. Hence, the present study investigated acoustic correlates of emphatic stress by comparing acoustic parametersfrequency, intensity and duration- in stressed and unstressed words in seventeen native Tamil speakers in each gender within the age range of 18- 30 years. Ten two- word noun phrases, were read and recorded under the two conditions. The waveforms, pitch curve and intensity curve of the first word was displayed using Praat software and duration, peak frequency, and peak intensity of the first word were extracted. Results indicated duration to be a major correlate of emphasis in Tamil. Keywords: Emphasis, stress, Tamil, frequency, duration, intensity.