Cover Image

Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words

The prosodic characteristic of Malay, spoken in Malaysia, such as stress and rhythm, are understudied instrumentally. Most of the studies reported are based on auditory and perceptual observations. This study looks at the acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words in terms of its different types o...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani
Other Authors: Yap, Ngee Thai
Format: Book Chapter
Language:English
English
English
Published: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press 2019
Subjects:
H Social Sciences (General)
P Philology. Linguistics
Online Access:http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/1/3_170419%20Identifying%20Acoustic%20Correlates%20--%20dd-comments_YNT_formatted.pdf
http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/7/acceptance_asylnn0001.pdf
http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/12/74300_Identifying%20acoustic%20correlates%20of%20stress%20in%20Malay%20words.pdf
http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
id my.iium.irep.74300
record_format dspace
spelling my.iium.irep.743002021-04-13T06:43:24Z http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/ Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani H Social Sciences (General) P Philology. Linguistics The prosodic characteristic of Malay, spoken in Malaysia, such as stress and rhythm, are understudied instrumentally. Most of the studies reported are based on auditory and perceptual observations. This study looks at the acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words in terms of its different types of morphological structures and number of syllables. To investigate this, a list comprising a) disyllabic monomorphemic words; b) polysyllabic monomorphemic words and c) polysyllabic morphologically complex words in isolation and in sentence was created. Three Malay native speakers were recruited as language informants. The measurements of the vowel durations and intensity of those target words, produced by the speakers, were then elicited from the spectrograms and analysed statistically. The findings show that: a) for vowel duration; word final lengthening is only prominent feature in both disyllabic and polysyllabic monomorphemic isolated words, whereas stem-final lengthening is found for polysyllabic monomorphemic complex words in isolation; b) for the normalised intensity, only the results for disyllabic monomorphemic target words are found to be significant, in which V1 is louder than V2. However, no other significant effects of vowel position, production type, subjects and morphological contexts are found on the normalised intensity. From this data, it can be proposed that intensity is not a robust indicator of stress in Malay. A correlation test run on these two phonetic variables also revealed no relationship between the vowel duration and the normalised intensity. This experiment indicates that words produced in isolation did show alignment of prosodic prominence with particular syllables, akin to what has been found in studies of lexical stress in other languages but, in connected speech, this alignment seem to disappear. Universiti Putra Malaysia Press Yap, Ngee Thai Setter, Jane 2019 Book Chapter NonPeerReviewed application/pdf en http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/1/3_170419%20Identifying%20Acoustic%20Correlates%20--%20dd-comments_YNT_formatted.pdf application/pdf en http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/7/acceptance_asylnn0001.pdf application/pdf en http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/12/74300_Identifying%20acoustic%20correlates%20of%20stress%20in%20Malay%20words.pdf Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani (2019) Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words. In: Speech Research in a Malaysian Context. Universiti Putra Malaysia Press, Selangor Darul Ehsan, pp. 53-77. ISBN 978-967-2395-25-6
institution Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia
building IIUM Library
collection Institutional Repository
continent Asia
country Malaysia
content_provider International Islamic University Malaysia
content_source IIUM Repository (IREP)
url_provider http://irep.iium.edu.my/
language English
English
English
topic H Social Sciences (General)
P Philology. Linguistics
spellingShingle H Social Sciences (General)
P Philology. Linguistics
Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani
Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words
description The prosodic characteristic of Malay, spoken in Malaysia, such as stress and rhythm, are understudied instrumentally. Most of the studies reported are based on auditory and perceptual observations. This study looks at the acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words in terms of its different types of morphological structures and number of syllables. To investigate this, a list comprising a) disyllabic monomorphemic words; b) polysyllabic monomorphemic words and c) polysyllabic morphologically complex words in isolation and in sentence was created. Three Malay native speakers were recruited as language informants. The measurements of the vowel durations and intensity of those target words, produced by the speakers, were then elicited from the spectrograms and analysed statistically. The findings show that: a) for vowel duration; word final lengthening is only prominent feature in both disyllabic and polysyllabic monomorphemic isolated words, whereas stem-final lengthening is found for polysyllabic monomorphemic complex words in isolation; b) for the normalised intensity, only the results for disyllabic monomorphemic target words are found to be significant, in which V1 is louder than V2. However, no other significant effects of vowel position, production type, subjects and morphological contexts are found on the normalised intensity. From this data, it can be proposed that intensity is not a robust indicator of stress in Malay. A correlation test run on these two phonetic variables also revealed no relationship between the vowel duration and the normalised intensity. This experiment indicates that words produced in isolation did show alignment of prosodic prominence with particular syllables, akin to what has been found in studies of lexical stress in other languages but, in connected speech, this alignment seem to disappear.
author2 Yap, Ngee Thai
author_facet Yap, Ngee Thai
Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani
format Book Chapter
author Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani
author_sort Wan Ahmad, Wan Aslynn Salwani
title Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words
title_short Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words
title_full Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words
title_fullStr Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words
title_full_unstemmed Identifying acoustic correlates of stress in Malay words
title_sort identifying acoustic correlates of stress in malay words
publisher Universiti Putra Malaysia Press
publishDate 2019
url http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/1/3_170419%20Identifying%20Acoustic%20Correlates%20--%20dd-comments_YNT_formatted.pdf
http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/7/acceptance_asylnn0001.pdf
http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/12/74300_Identifying%20acoustic%20correlates%20of%20stress%20in%20Malay%20words.pdf
http://irep.iium.edu.my/74300/
_version_ 1696976061859889152
score 13.211869

Similar Items