Duration and Intensity as Physical Correlates of Linguistic Stress

The experiments reported in this paper are an attempt to explore the influence of certain physical cues on the perception of linguistic stress patterns. The material chosen was a group of English words in which a change of function from noun to verb is commonly associated with a shift of stress from the first to the second syllable. Spectrograms were used to determine the vowel duration and intensity ratios which occur in these words and this information was applied in making up a test in which listeners' judgments of stress could be correlated with variations in the duration and intensity ratios. The results of the experiments show that duration and intensity ratios are both cues for judgments of stress and that, in the material studied, duration ratio is a more effective cue than intensity ratio.