Acoustic correlates of stress and pitch accent in Tashlhiyt Berber

This paper reports results of a phonetic study of stress and pitch accent in Tashlhiyt Berber, an Afro-Asiatic language that is famous for possessing words consisting of only obstruents. This study examines evidence for word-level stress and phrase-level accent in Tashlhiyt and addresses the question of how both prosodic properties are acoustically realized in segments, such as obstruents, that provide a relatively impoverished backdrop for the manifestation of prominence. Results indicate that F0 is raised in the phrase-final nucleus relative to both the penultimate nucleus of the phrase and also to word-final nuclei that are phrase-medial. This raising of F0 is consistently observed on sonorant nuclei, inconsistently associated with voiced obstruents, and absent from voiceless obstruents, which lack an F0 but often trigger insertion of an epenthetic vowel to aid in the realization of F0 information. A further result is that intensity is higher in the nucleus of a word-final syllable relative to one in the penult of a word. We interpret the greater intensity associated with word-final syllables as a marker of word-level stress and the raising of F0 in phrase-final syllables as a phrase-level pitch accent docking on the final stressed syllable of a phrase.

► F0, intensity, and duration were investigated as potential correlates of stress and pitch accent.
► Results indicated that intensity was greater in word-final nuclei and F0 was higher in phrase-final nuclei.
► We interpret intensity as a marker of word-final stress and F0 as a cue to phrase-final pitch accent.