LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Konkani Language

Radish Kumar, B. M.Sc. (Speech Language Pathology)
Jayashree S. Bhat, M.Sc. (Speech and Hearing), Ph.D.

Abstract

Stress is an extra effort put on a word or a syllable or a phrase to emphasize special meaning. The acoustic cues for stress include fundamental frequency, increased amplitude, lengthened duration and increased vowel quality. Thus cues vary depending on the languages.

The acoustic correlates of stress in Konkani language is not well understood. Hence the present study attempted to investigate the acoustic correlates of stress in Konkani language. A total of 10 subjects in the age range of 18-40 years participated in the study. Ten naïve speakers of Konkani language were asked to speak two word phrases (adjective + noun) with and without stress on the adjectives. Praat software was used to extract peak f0, peak intensity and duration of the first word (adjective) in both the conditions. Independentt test was employed to compare the significance of differences of means between the stressed and unstressed conditions.

The results revealed significant increase in word duration in stressed conditions when comparison to unstressed condition in all the speakers at p<0.001. The increase in duration in stressed conditions may be attributing towards the differences between long and short vowels in Konkani language.

Introduction

Stress is an extra effort put on a word or a syllable or a phrase to emphasize special meaning. It has been called the most elusive of all prosodic features (Lehiste, 1970) which refers to accentuation or emphasis, laid on syllable or word.

The acoustic correlates for stress include fundamental frequency, increased amplitude, lengthened duration and increased vowel quality. These cues vary depending upon the language. The relative importance of f0, intensity and duration as acoustic correlates of stress has been studied experimentally in several languages by various researchers.

In languages such as English (Bolinger, 1958; Morton & Jassem, 1965), French (Rigault, 1962) and Polish (Jassem, Morten & Steffen-Botog, 1968), fundamental frequency is reported to be the major correlate. Duration is found to be the major correlate of stress in Swedish (Westin, Buddenhagen & Obrecht, 1966), Estonian (Lehiste, 1968a) and Italian (Bertinetto, 1980).

There have been very few studies done on acoustic correlates of stress with respect to Indian languages. Among Indian languages like Tamil (Balasubramanyam, 1981) and Kannada (Savithri, 1987; Raju Pratap, 1991; Savithri 1999 a, b), duration is reported to be the major correlate of stress and duration and fundamental frequency in Hindi (Ruchi, 2007). Thus, the major acoustic correlates of stress differ depending upon the languages.

The same has not been explored in many Indian languages. Konkani is one such language which has not been focussed in many studies till date. Konkani is a language of India, and belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. It is an Indo-Aryan language, spoken on the west coast of India called Konkan (Cited in Wikipedia). It includes a significant number of loan words derived from Dravidian languages including Kannada and Tulu.

Need for the study

As the acoustic correlates of stress vary depending upon the language, there is a need to study stress in different languages. There have been no studies reported on acoustic correlates of stress in Konkani language and so, the same was investigated in this study.

Aim of the study

To study the acoustic correlates of stress in Konkani language.

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