Pitch Accent

[Isobel W]

In the Jurafsky and Martin reading it says that “pitch accent is related to stress” and I wasn’t sure what they meant by this so I googled it – however the pages I looked at talked about stress accent and pitch accent languages. The example the book gave was in English – a stress accent language. Am a bit confused by the terminology and just wanted to clarify what this means.

[Simon]

Welcome to the wonderful world of prosody! Terminology is sometimes used differently by different authors.

This is why the video ‘Prosody’ avoided getting into definitions and concentrated on the engineering application. So…keeping to what is relevant for speech synthesis, and talking only about English:

Words are made of syllables. In the pronunciation dictionary, at least one syllable in the word is marked as having primary lexical stress, and perhaps some other syllables as having secondary lexical stress.

When spoken in citation form (i.e., as an isolated word, obeying the dictionary pronunciation), the primary lexically-stressed syllable will sound more prominent than the others. The speaker will make some F0 movement on it to achieve this, and probably also make it louder and longer than usual. This is called a pitch accent. There might also be smaller pitch accents on the other lexically-stressed syllables.

In connected speech, not every lexically-stressed syllable in a spoken sentence will receive a pitch accent (there would be too many). Only some words in the sentence will be chosen by the speaker to receive a pitch accent, which will be placed on a lexically-stressed syllable.

So: lexical stress marked in the dictionary indicates syllables that might receive a pitch accent in connected speech.

Syllables that are not accented may have their vowels reduced, potentially all the way to schwa.

[Author]

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