ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Methodological Influences on Word Stress Identification: Implications for Research and Teaching

Mahdi Duris, John Levis, Reza Neiriz, Alif Silpachai

Accurate word stress influences the intelligibility of L2 and L1 English speakers, making it important in areas such as language assessment and perception training. Accurate rating of word stress accuracy is assumed to be straightforward. However, reliably rating word stress in English is difficult because stress is signaled by four possible acoustic correlates (pitch, duration, intensity, and vowel quality), which are not always present in all spoken words. Multiple cues mean that direct judgments of word stress involve embedded decisions, leading to widely varied levels of agreement in published studies. To investigate the influence of methodological decisions on word stress judgments, we employed two approaches to stress identification. Three phonetically-trained expert listeners rated stress placement by 10 Chinese L1 speakers of English who each read 100 multisyllabic English words (2-6 syllables), 1,000 words in total. In the first approach, raters identified whether each word was correctly stressed. In the second, listeners made a series of binary decisions about stress placement, syllable count, and vowel quality. Rater scores resulted in agreement levels among all three listeners of 41% (for approach one) to 91.6% (for primary stress placement in Approach 2), showing that ratings of word stress are sensitive to construct definitions.