Gender differences in the acoustic realization of lexical, phrasal, and contrastive stress

Abstract This study investigates how lexical, phrasal, and contrastive stress are acoustically realized in American English, focusing on whether men and women differ in how they use pitch, amplitude, and duration to convey stress. Thirty-six native speakers completed minimal-pair stress production tasks online. We analyzed the resulting speech using prosodic contour measures, Bayesian ANOVAs, mixed-effects regression, Random Forest Classification, and human coder judgments. Results show greater acoustic overlap between lexical and contrastive stress than between either of those and phrasal stress. Duration was the primary cue for phrasal stress, while lexical and contrastive stress relied more evenly on multiple cues. Gender-based differences were especially evident in contrastive stress, which, to our knowledge, has not previously been studied in relation to gender: women relied more on pitch, while men emphasized amplitude and duration. These findings highlight the multidimensional acoustic nature of stress realization and demonstrate the value of combining computational and perceptual approaches in prosody research.