Articulation of word and sentence stress

This paper reports on the articulation of two aspects of speech prosody: word and sentence stress. Word stress is examined in reiterant renditions of minimal pairs differing in the location of main stress (e.g., DIScharge–disCHARGE), with the contrastive stress difference manifested as differences in the location of the nuclear pitch accent. Sentence stress is examined in sets of minimal sentences differing in the presence or location of the nuclear pitch accent (e.g., so TOMMY gave Debby a song from Timmy). Three talkers read these materials while movements of the jaw and tongue (using the Carstens Articulograph) or of 20 reflective infrared markers on the face (using the Qualysis Motion Capture system) were recorded. Syllables with and without contrastive pitch accents are compared along several articulatory dimensions, including: jaw displacement and duration of movement, jaw peak opening and closing velocities, jaw peak acceleration, whole head displacement, and eyebrow displacement. These comparisons allow us to determine whether the talkers articulate the focused syllables/words differently. The three talkers were selected to differ in their overall visual speech intelligibility, as rated by expert deaf speechreaders, and therefore interspeaker differences in articulation are expected. [Work supported by NSF KDI Grant 9996088.]