Abstract:
Many cases of apparent `stress shift' in American English, e.g., ``MAssachusetts MIRacle,'' show early pitch accent within the word, influenced both by pitch accent clash with the following word, and by prosodic constituent structure: The first pitch accent in a new intermediate intonational phrase occurs as early in the word as possible (Beckman and Edwards, 1994; Shattuck-Hufnagel et al., 1994). The lexical stress pattern of the word also plays a role: Words with alternating stress (e.g., Massachusetts, absolutely) behave quite regularly, but words with adjacent full-vowel syllables (e.g., maintain, unlikely) are more variable (Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1995). One possible account of this irregularity is that adjacent-stress words challenge the prevalent patterns of rhythmic alternation in American English. In this study, the effects of both word-level and phrase-level rhythmic context on the pitch accent behavior of words with these two stress patterns are explored, in a large corpus of FM radio news speech [M. Beckman and J. Edwards, in Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form: Papers in Laboratory Phonology III (1994); Shattuck-Hufnagel et al., J. Phon. 22, 357--388 (1994); Shattuck-Hufnagel, in Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (1995)]. [Work supported by NIH Grant R01-DC-02125 and NSF Grant IRI 9314967.]