Chapter published in:
Approaches to Hungarian: Volume 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference
Edited by Veronika Hegedűs and Irene Vogel
[Approaches to Hungarian 16] 2020
► pp. 187–206

Fixed stress as phonological redundancy

Effects on production and perception in Hungarian and other languages

From the perspective of word prosody, fixed stress languages such as Hungarian may seem rather uninteresting: stress, by definition, always falls on the same position in a word. This paper examines the acoustic properties of Hungarian stress based on a large, systematically collected, corpus and considers them in relation to issues of redundancy in speech production and in speech perception (stress deafness). The Hungarian findings also serve as the basis of comparison for languages with other types of stress systems, analysed with the same methods: Turkish, Arabic and Spanish. It is demonstrated that stress predictability affects both speech production and perception, and also that its effect may be mitigated by exceptions in otherwise predictable stress languages.
Keywords: stress, redundancy, stress perception, stress production, stress deafness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Stress systems and redundancy
    • 2.1Overview of stress systems
    • 2.2Redundancy and predictable stress
    • 2.3Predictable stress: Perception and production
      • 2.3.1Stress perception
      • 2.3.2Production
  • 3.Experimental design: Stress production and analysis
    • 3.1Experimental design
      • 3.1.1Hypotheses
      • 3.1.2Procedure
    • 3.2Stimuli
    • 3.3Analyses
  • 4.Results: Stress properties in Hungarian, and comparison with other languages
  • 5.Discussion: Effects of predictability and exceptions on the production and perception of stress
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 08 April 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.16.09vog
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