Stress in simple words

The nature of stress

Stress has been mentioned several times already in this course without an explanation of what the word means. The nature of stress is simple enough: practically everyone would agree that the first syllable of words like 'father', 'open', 'camera' is stressed, that the middle syllable is stressed in 'potato', 'apartment', 'relation', and that the final syllable is stressed in 'about', 'receive', 'perhaps'. Also, most people feel they have some sort of idea of what the difference is between stressed and unstressed syllables, although they might explain it in different ways.

We will mark a stressed syllable in transcription by placing a small vertical line (') high up, just before the syllable it relates to; the words quoted above will thus be transcribed as follows:

'fɑ:ðə                 pə'teɪtəʊ             ə'baut

'əʊpən               ə'pɑ:tmənt          rɪ'si:v

'kæmṛə              rɪ'leɪʃṇ                  pə'hasps

What are the characteristics of stressed syllables that enable us to identify them? It is important to understand that there are two different ways of approaching this question. One is to consider what the speaker does in producing stressed syllables and the other is to consider what characteristics of sound make a syllable seem to a listener to be stressed. In other words, we can study stress from the points of view of production and of perception; the two are obviously closely related, but are not identical. The production of stress is generally believed to depend on the speaker using more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables. Measuring muscular effort is difficult, but it seems possible, according to experimental studies, that when we produce stressed syllables, the muscles that we use to expel air from the lungs are often more active, producing higher subglottal pressure. It seems probable that similar things happen with muscles in other parts of our vocal apparatus.

Many experiments have been carried out on the perception of stress, and it is clear that many different sound characteristics are important in making a syllable recognizably stressed. From the perceptual point of view, all stressed syllables have one characteristic in common, and that is prominence. Stressed syllables are recognized as stressed because they are more prominent than unstressed syllables. What makes a syllable prominent? At least four different factors are important:

i) Most people seem to feel that stressed syllables are louder than unstressed syllables; in other words, loudness is a component of prominence. In a sequence of identical syllables (e.g. ba:ba:ba:ba:), if one syllable is made louder than the others, it will be heard as stressed. However, it is important to realize that it is very difficult for a speaker to make a syllable louder without changing other characteristics of the syllable such as those explained below (ii-iv); if one literally changes only the loudness, the perceptual effect is not very strong.

ii) The length of syllables has an important part to play in prominence. If one of the syllables in our "nonsense word" ba:ba:ba:ba: is made longer than the others, there is quite a strong tendency for that syllable to be heard as stressed.

iii) Every voiced syllable is said on some pitch; pitch in speech is closely related to the frequency of vibration of the vocal folds and to the musical notion of low- and high-pitched notes. It is essentially a perceptual characteristic of speech. If one syllable of our "nonsense word" is said with a pitch that is noticeably different from that of the others, this will have a strong tendency to produce the effect of prominence. For example, if all syllables are said with low pitch except for one said with high pitch, then the high-pitched syllable will be heard as stressed and the others as unstressed. To place some movement of pitch (e.g. rising or falling) on a syllable is even more effective in making it sound prominent.

iv) A syllable will tend to be prominent if it contains a vowel that is different in quality from neighboring vowels. If we change one of the vowels in our "nonsense word" (e.g. ba:bi:ba:ba:) the "odd" syllable bi: will tend to be heard as stressed. This effect is not very powerful, but there is one particular way in which it is relevant in English: we explained how the most frequently encountered vowels in weak syllables are ə, ɪ, i, u (syllabic consonants are also common). We can look on stressed syllables as occurring against a "background" of these weak syllables, so that their prominence is increased by contrast with these background qualities.

Prominence, then, is produced by four main factors: (i) loudness, (ii) length, (iii) pitch and (iv) quality. Generally these four factors work together in combination, although syllables may sometimes be made prominent by means of only one or two of them. Experimental work has shown that these factors are not equally important; the strongest effect is produced by pitch, and length is also a powerful factor. Loudness and quality have much less effect.