RESUMO
Although much has been written on the relative importance of acoustic correlates of linguistic stress for the listener, the role of spectral expansion/reduction has been much understudied. The present article is the first to study the role of spectral expansion/reduction in a two- parameter study together with temporal structure exploiting systematic variation of both parameters in a 7 × 7 stimulus space. We used a single minimal stress pair in Dutch, a language in which all classic acoustic correlates of stress were shown earlier to be relevant in single-parameter studies, i.e. pitch movement, intensity (loudness), temporal organization and spectral expansion/reduction. The results of our study reconfirmed that temporal organization is a strong cue to stress perception when target words are presented out of focus (i.e. without a pitch accent on the target). Spectral expansion/reduction was a very weak stress cue; its effect was noticeable only when temporal structure was ambiguous between initial and final stress. These results suggest that spectral expansion/reduction is indeed the weakest of the four cues traditionally identified in the literature, at least in stress-accent languages such as English and Dutch.
