2025년 10월 24일, 한양대학교 음성·언어인지과학 연구소 주최로 Mariko Sugahara (Doshisha University) 선생님의 초청 콜로퀴엄이 진행되었습니다.
On October 24, 2025, the Hanyang Institute for Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language (HIPCS) hosted an invited colloquium featuring Professor Mariko Sugahara from the Doshisha University.
Title: On English "unstressed" full vowels, and the current English stress experiment
Abstract: My talk addresses the question of whether pretonic full vowels in English carry non-primary stress (i.e., secondary stress). While English tends to alternate stressed and unstressed syllables, words such as cascade and audition contain adjacent full-vowel syllables, raising the question of whether the initial vowel is stressed. Pronunciation dictionaries (Jones et al. 2011; Wells 2008; Upton & Kretzschmar 2017) assign no stress to such syllables, whereas phonologists such as Liberman & Prince (1977) and Selkirk (1980) assume that all full vowels bear some level of stress. Sugahara (2021) asked native American English speakers to introspectively rate the prominence levels (on a 1-5 scale) of syllables containing primary (P), secondary (S), pretonic full (U), and reduced (R) vowels. The ratings for U were between those for S and R, but not significantly different from either of them. One possible hypothesis derived from the result is that U vowels are stressed as S vowels are, whereas they lack a pre-nuclear pitch accent as R vowels do. To test this hypothesis, I examined the spectral properties of S and U in the post-focus stretch of utterances, where pitch accents are eradicated. If the hypothesis were on the right track, then the spectral characteristics of S and U should converge in the post-focus environment. However, no such evidence was obtained. These findings suggest that U vowels form an intermediate category between canonically stressed and reduced vowels. One caveat is that there may be fine-grained differences across vowel categories and morphological environments, and some U vowels may indeed carry non-primary stress, which should be investigated further in the future.
This talk is preceded or followed by a brief introduction of the experiment that I have conducted at the HIPCS lab on the production and perception of English stress by native Seoul Korean speakers.