Prosodic cue weighting in phonetic realization of lexical prominence in Persian

The present paper addresses the role of stress, accent and syllable position on word-level prominence in Persian. F0, duration and overall intensity of syllables in initial, medial and final position of the Persian poly-syllabic words were measured across accented and unaccented conditions. The results for F0 showed no syllables except for the final syllable receive a prominence-lending pitch movement. The results for overall intensity indicated that like F0, intensity correlates with accent rather than stress or syllable position. The results for duration suggested that the initial unstressed syllables are longer than final stressed syllables. Furthermore, differences in duration between the syllables concerned were found to be significant even in the unaccented condition. These results were interpreted as suggesting that there are two prosodic factors affecting word-level prominence in the syntagmatic axis, namely stress and syllable position, where syllable position outweighs stress in lending more prominence to initial syllables in poly-syllabic words. Overall, the results suggested that unlike F0 and intensity, duration in Persian is an acoustic correlate of both stress and syllable position which interacts with each other to determine the prominence of syllables in Persian poly-syllabic words.