title: Spectral and temporal reduction as stress cues in Dutch.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Phonetics Laboratory, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden, The Netherlands. v.j.j.p.van.heuven@hum.leidenuniv.nl
authors.forename: Vincent J
authors.initials: VJ
authors.lastname: van Heuven
authors.forename: Mirjam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: de Jonge
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009426:Netherlands; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult