Word-prosodic typology of Central Pame: Acoustic evidence for stress and tone

The co-ocurrence of phonological word-level stress and tone is cross-linguistically rare. Word-level stress is a complex cluster concept that involves a number of different dimensions making it a cross-linguistically challenging topic. This study investigates the status of stress and tone in an underdocumented language taking into consideration several dimensions that are known to interact with stress marking cross-linguistically. Central Pame is an Otomanguean language whose word prosodic system has been impressionistically described as one with stress and tone, with a three-way tonal contrast. This study presents the first quantitative investigation of the acoustic correlates duration, intensity, formant structure, spectral tilt, and fundamental frequency in the language. Results indicate that duration is longer in stressed than in deaccented syllables. Intensity and, to some degree, spectral tilt measures are also affected by stress. Additionally, we find evidence for a three-way tonal contrast marked with fundamental frequency and duration and which varies between female and male speakers.