Acoustic correlates of stress in Principense Portuguese: a preliminary study

Resumo

In São Tomé and Príncipe, 98.4% of the population speaks Portuguese. Given that Principense Portuguese (PP) is in contact with a tone language – Lung’Ie, we hypothesize that F0 is an acoustic correlate of stress, unlike Brazilian and European Portuguese. Lung’Ie is a highly endangered Portuguese-lexified creole spoken on Príncipe Island with a tonal H/Ø privative system (Agostinho; Hyman, 2021). This study analyzed the duration and F0 of vowels in 19 Portuguese words and two borrowed words from Lung’Ie, produced by two bilingual speakers of PP and Lung’Ie. Results show that stressed vowels have the highest mean and median duration and greater F0, though the magnitude of difference in F0 between stressed and unstressed vowels is less prominent than that in duration. Thus, we propose that both duration and F0 are acoustic correlates of stress in PP, duration being the principal correlate.