CORRELATES OF STRESS

A stress can be expressed by reducing phonological vowels from unstressed syllables.

The main correlates of stress production are: duration, intensity and tone.

TONE

Ascending tone in the stressed syllable.

Delattre ’s finding

Found that the length of stressed vowels was six times that of unstressed vowels in English.

But only three times that of unstressed vowels in Spanish.

There is much less research on learning the correlates of stress than there is on learning the stress systems of other languages

And even less based on comparisons between Spanish and English.

DURATION

is usually expressed through
lengthening the vowel in the stressed syllable

“pitch accents” are considered in
many articles to refer to prosodic stress

INTENSITY

Increase in volume in the stressed syllable

SPECTRAL TILT

ENGLISH

The linguistic community
largely agrees on duration as the primary correlate of English

1958 study (in addition to his 1955 one), which said that pitch was a primary correlate in English

SPANISH

Beckman and Edwards concluded that
pitch was secondary to duration in non-prosodic stress

Ortega-Llebaria and Prieto (2010)
compared declarative sentences with reporting clauses

They found that Spanish had a minor but still present contrast in intensity and
less of a contrast in duration between stressed and unstressed syllables

no correlate can cue stress on its own, and that pitch is
necessary to cue stress unless both duration and intensity are present.

The most recent study on Spanish stress correlates was in Vogel et al.’s 2016 article,which concludes that pitch and pitch change relative to other syllables is the primary correlate of stress in Spanish in words not in focus

“intensity distribution”

is another method of examining intensity

may be perceived as increased volume because of the “rising spectrum” of intensity