How Long Is a Stress Group?

Plinio Almeida Barbosa's (2001) thesis that the number of syllables in a stress group is constrained by the requirement of keeping sentence stress & syllable rhythms synchronized is tested on Finnish data. In Barbosa's synthesis model, synchronized stress & syllable oscillators provide a way to choose the most natural placement of stresses given a choice between several lexical accent types. An analysis of a Finnish formal speech sample (a ten-minute radio broadcast) shows that similar forces are at work in natural speech production. Probability distributions for stress group length calculated with the coupled oscillator model are confirmed by the corpus analysis. It is concluded that coordination of stress & syllable rhythms plays a role in the length of stress groups. 4 Tables, 5 Figures, 1 Appendix, 17 References. Adapted from the source document