Abstract
This paper aims to conduct a basic research of Turkish word accent and to investigate one of its acoustical character, duration in correlation with phonetic stress. It is said that Turkish word accent basically realizes as stress on the final syllable, and that stressed vowels are prolonged. In the final syllable, in addition, stressed vowels undergo final lengthening. Since final stressed vowels are doubly lengthened, their duration does not accurately have an effect on word stress. In order to determine whether duration correlates with stress, it is necessary to compare examples that include final stressed vowels with ones that include non-final stressed vowels.
Since the present study is a basic research, and focuses on extracting default phonetic patterns of duration in correlation with phonetic stress, an optimal informant was deliberately selected with due consideration for essential factors such as birth place, native dialect, and voice quality. Speech samples were recorded, and the intensity and duration of stressed vowels was calculated.
The conclusions are as follows:
(1) In non-final syllables the duration of stressed vowels is longer by 10.7-17.1msec. than that of unstressed vowels. In final syllables, on the other hand, the duration of stressed vowels is longer by -8.3-4.4msec. than that of unstressed vowels, since final lengthening worked in this environment.
(2) The results of t-test showed a significant difference between the nonfinal pairs, e. g. i of mi in miser and i of Mi in Misir. But the results of t-test on the final stressed pairs didn't show a significant difference.
(3) The results of this experiment show that in non-final syllables, where final lengthening is not applicable, the duration of stressed vowels is longer than that of unstressed vowels, and that the difference is statistically significant. However it is questionable whether the difference in duration can be perceived by native speakers and a stressed syllable is psychologically longer than unstressed one, since the difference in duration between lexically short and long vowels such as ‘i’ and ‘ig’ is clearly much greater (about 40msec.).
