Temporaland dynamic characteristics of vowels under neutraland emphatic stress

Stress in the Russian language is traditionally considered to be primarily quantitative. The role of other acoustic parameters, intensity in particular, involved in producing the prominence effect, has not been sufficiently covered. Thus, the use of temporal and dynamic parameters of emphatic stress is of special interest. Duration and intensity in words with neutral and emphatic stress are analyzed. The speech material for analysis comprises the word ‘Stas’ embedded in the carrier phrase ‘Stas ne byl tihoney’ (‘Stas was not quiet’) with the target word occupying initial, medial and final positions in the phrase; in each position the word was pronounced with neutral and emphatic stress. Praat software was used to extract the duration and average intensity of the sound [a] in the word ‘Stas’. The Student paired t-test was used to note the significance of difference between neutrally and emphatically stressed vowels. The analysis has shown an increase in vowel duration in emphatically stressed words. A general trend is observed to temporally mark the vowel in the phrase initial and phrase final positions. The emphatically stressed vowels were pronounced with higher intensity. This is achieved through an increase of either absolute or relative intensity values. The degree of both duration and intensity increase varies among the speakers. Due to a high correlation between the duration and energy curves of vowels, it does not seem expedient to describe stress with the energy parameter.