The acoustic manifestation of stress and focus in Romanian

Abstract The acoustic properties of two types of prosodic prominence, stress and focus at the lexical and sentence levels, respectively, are examined in Romanian. Real three-syllable words were produced by 9 native speakers in two sentential contexts: with focus on the target word (focus context) and with focus on a word later in the sentence (non-focus context). The position of stress was systematically varied, so it appeared on each of the three syllable positions. Analyses of over 3,500 vowels show that duration and F0 are robust correlates of lexical stress in Romanian, consistent with cross-linguistic patterns . Focus further enhances these stress-related properties , lengthening and raising the pitch of stressed syllables in particular, with smaller effects on unstressed ones. In addition, vowel space visualizations based on F1 and F2 indicate that stress produces slightly more peripheral realizations and that focus reinforces this tendency. These results demonstrate that stress and focus interact additively in Romanian, primarily through duration and F0, and they highlight how prosodic prominence is manifested in a Romance language that has been underrepresented in the literature.