van Heuven Vincent J, de Jonge Mirjam
Phonetics Laboratory, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Phonetica. 2011;68(3):120-32. doi: 10.1159/000329900. Epub 2011 Nov 30.
Although much has been written on the relative importance of acoustic correlates of linguistic stress for the listener, the role of spectral expansion/reduction has been much understudied. The present article is the first to study the role of spectral expansion/reduction in a two- parameter study together with temporal structure exploiting systematic variation of both parameters in a 7 × 7 stimulus space. We used a single minimal stress pair in Dutch, a language in which all classic acoustic correlates of stress were shown earlier to be relevant in single-parameter studies, i.e. pitch movement, intensity (loudness), temporal organization and spectral expansion/reduction. The results of our study reconfirmed that temporal organization is a strong cue to stress perception when target words are presented out of focus (i.e. without a pitch accent on the target). Spectral expansion/reduction was a very weak stress cue; its effect was noticeable only when temporal structure was ambiguous between initial and final stress. These results suggest that spectral expansion/reduction is indeed the weakest of the four cues traditionally identified in the literature, at least in stress-accent languages such as English and Dutch.
尽管关于语言重音的声学相关特征对听者的相对重要性已有诸多论述，但频谱扩展/缩减的作用却鲜有研究。本文首次在一项双参数研究中探讨频谱扩展/缩减的作用，该研究结合了时间结构，并在一个7×7的刺激空间中利用这两个参数的系统变化。我们使用了荷兰语中的一对最小重音对，在这种语言中，所有经典的重音声学相关特征在早期的单参数研究中都被证明是相关的，即音高变化、强度（响度）、时间组织和频谱扩展/缩减。我们的研究结果再次证实，当目标词处于非聚焦状态（即目标词上没有音高重音）时，时间组织是重音感知的一个强线索。频谱扩展/缩减是一个非常弱的重音线索；只有当时间结构在词首重音和词尾重音之间不明确时，其效果才会明显。这些结果表明，至少在像英语和荷兰语这样的重音语言中，频谱扩展/缩减确实是文献中传统上确定的四个线索中最弱的一个。
