{"id":1276,"date":"2020-03-24T12:11:23","date_gmt":"2020-03-24T12:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/corpus.eduhk.hk\/english_pronunciation\/?page_id=1276"},"modified":"2020-03-31T08:35:01","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T08:35:01","slug":"4-2-lexical-stress","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/corpus.eduhk.hk\/english_pronunciation\/index.php\/4-2-lexical-stress\/","title":{"rendered":"4.2. Measuring Lexical Stress"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In this chapter, we will discuss the application of Praat in the analysis of the word stress and intonation. Both of stress and intonation belong to the suprasegmental features. There are two kinds of stress: word stress and sentence stress. Word stress is concerned with the stressing of individual words of two or more syllables when they are pronounced in isolation. By intonation we mean the rise and fall of the pitch-change of the voice which take place on the nucleus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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4.2.1. What is lexical stress?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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In English we usually find that simple words consisting of two or more syllables have a strong stress on one of these syllables and a weak stress on the remaining syllable or syllables. Stress plays an important role in communication, for it distinguishes different meanings when the stress is put in different positions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll stressed syllables in words have one characteristic in common, and that is\u00a0prominence. <\/strong>Prominence<\/strong>\u00a0is produced by four main factor:(i) loudness (intensity), (ii) length, (iii) pitch (Fundamental Frequency\/F0), (iv) quality<\/span>. <\/strong>Generally these four factors work together in combination, but experimental work has shown that these factors are not equally important; the strongest effect is produced by pitch, and length is also a powerful factor. Loudness and quality have much less effect\u201d (Roach 2009:74).<\/p>\n

Since stress is manifested as rise in pitch, greater intensity (loudness) or greater vowel length, the analysis of stress must include various elements of acoustic analysis, like waveform, spectrogram, and pitch contour. (See Figure 4.1).<\/p>\n

Figure 4.1 The waveform, spectrogram, and pitch contour of sound<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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