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