Speech Units Workshop

The study of word stress in Indonesian languages has led to divergent accounts. Word prosodic phenomena have not always been analysed as stress and the question is whether Indonesian languages have word stress at all. The available empirical studies to date cover little of the language diverstiy found in this area. The talk summarizes at least four studies on different aspects of Papuan Malay word stress; acoustics, perception and functional aspects related to the role of word stress in the lexicon. Papuan Malay was impressionistically analysed as a language with regular penultimate word stress, which moves to the ultimate if the penult contains schwa. The acoustic realization is studied by measuring more than ten potential cues to word stress in spontaneous speech. The perception of these cues is investigated using word recognition tasks. Lexical analyses using random forests and word-embedding statistics are done to understand the phonological nature and word disambiguating role of stress patterns respectively. The aim is to start answering whether there is word stress in this language and how it relates to other Indonesian languages and other stress languages in the world. Although the results make a stressless analysis of Papuan Malay difficult, the question arises whether existing prosodic typology can fully account for the type of word stress found in this language. Specific attention is given to the diagnostic process of word stress in an underdescribed language and its position in prosodic structure.