The stress pattern of Sindhi & English

The Stress Pattern of Sindhi & English Phonetic Correlates of Lexical Stress in Sindhi & English Abdul Malik Abbasi Sindh Madressatul Islam University This book aims to explore the syllable structure and stress patterns in Sindhi and English words through the analysis of behavioral data from speech judgment experiments, and of acoustic data from speech production experiments, conducted with native speakers of Sindhi and American native speakers. The evidence presented argues for analyzing Sindhi as a language in which intonation contours appear to be independent of stress that is completely orthogonal to F0 contours unlike in most stress languages in which pitch accents dock on stressed syllables. Sindhi pitch accent rises from the first syllable in disyllable words, irrespective of syllable weight, and the rise is followed by a fall at end of the word. The duration and stop closure of stressed vowels were greater than the unstressed, while F1-F2 and F0 values were higher in stressed and lower in unstressed vowels which is a quite evident that phonetic correlates of lexical stress in Sindhi. Thus, the phonetic analysis of lexical stress discovered strong evidence of modification of all phonetic exponents of stress which seems to demonstrate that Sindhi is a stress accent language. In addition, the study investigates learner’s stress patterns by measuring their reports of word stress location in their Sindhi and in their L2 English. Results of the experiments show that Sindhi speakers have less awareness of stress location in their native language than native English controls, and this effect carries into their L2 English. Teachers of Sindhi-speaking students should be prepared to provide explicit training on word stress. ISBN 9783862888368. LINCOM Language Research 11. 222pp. 2017.