Acoustics of stress and weight in Central Alaskan Yup’ik

Abstract

In Central Alaskan Yup’ik, syllables with long vowels are always stressed, light syllables alternate stress, but only certain closed syllables are stressed. The acoustic correlates of stress, however, have only been the subject of one small-scale preliminary study so far. Moreover, there are divergent accounts of how phonological phenomena such as gemination and syllable closure affect weight. This article presents an acoustic investigation of gemination, stress, and phonemic length. Six Yup’ik recordings were annotated, resulting in a dataset of 2,602 syllable onsets and 2,282 vowels, which were then modelled using linear mixed-effects models. The first part of the study, examining the distribution of gemination as a metrical-adjacent phenomenon, revealed that singleton onsets were shorter than geminated onsets both within feet and across foot boundaries. The main study showed that stressed vowels were longer, louder, and, for short vowels only, higher in f0 than unstressed vowels, while long vowels were longer, louder, and featured greater f0 falls than short vowels. These results corroborate the literature that asserts that long, short unstressed, and short stressed vowels are all produced distinctively, and moreover, that vowel duration is affected by iambic lengthening and syllable closure. The identification of stress correlates and other metrical behaviors examined here set the stage for future prosodic work on Yup’ik.