Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian

Abstract

Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

THE INFLUENCE OF WORD STRESS ON EFL LEARNERS' ToT STATE

“…The fact that support the empirical data in this study is because Bahasa Indonesia and other regional languages in Indonesia belong to the low-stress frequency languages, or they can even be categorized as having no stress and it is different from English. In other words, Indonesian fails to show word-level stress (Athanasopoulou, Vogel, & Pincus 2021). Interestingly, English was not influenced by Bahasa or the regional languages in this case.…”

Learning Stress with Feet and Grids

“…Indonesian, which has an initial dactyl and main stress on the rightmost of the stresses is an exception. It is worth noting that the empirical facts for Indonesian stress are unclear; the initial dactyl pattern described by Cohn (1989) has not been instrumentally verified -see Goedemans & van Zanten (2007) and Athanasopoulou et al (2021) 8 shows a failed run, typical of all three failed runs. Here again NONFINALITY is helping to keep stress off the final syllable, allowing iambs to be used as the non-initial feet in the highest probability parses for the 5 and 7 syllable words, just as they are in the correct analysis.…”