STRESS SHIFT AND EARLY PITCH ACCENT PLACEMENT IN LEXICAL ITEMS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

The perception of early prominence in late-main-stress words like Miss issippi has been described in both metrical and intonational terms. Me trical theory views early prominence as the result of rhythmic stress shift under conditions of stress clash in the metrical grid, while int onation theory attributes early prominence to a tendency for speakers to place the first pitch accent of a phrase as early as possible. We d escribe an integrated theory of structural and rhythmic aspects of pit ch accent placement that combines parts of both approaches, and presen t evidence to support the theory from perceptual and acoustic analyses of a speech corpus produced in the FM radio news style. We find that early accent placement occurs in contexts which would otherwise result in pitch accent clash, and that the initial accent in an intermediate intonational phrase tends to be located early in its word. Double acc ents are more common on words that carry all the accents in a phrase ( as predicted by phrase onset marking), particularly for words with alt ernating rather than adjacent lexical stress. Acoustic evidence suppor ts the claim that perceived early prominences typically coincide with pitch accents, and replicates previous results showing no increase in duration for these accented syllables.