Prosodic patterns and phonetic realization of Kanakanavu lexical stress on disyllabic words

To the best of our knowledge, this is by far the first phonetic study on Kanakanavu, an endangered Austronesian language spoken in southern Taiwan. A disyllabic word pair only differs in stress position was recorded from four native speakers. Tone type and corresponding acoustic correlates were analyzed. Results showed that lexical stress is realized with ample prosodic patterns when it is on penultimate position, and differences of these patterns were reflected on the corresponding acoustic correlates: Duration of stressed and unstressed vowels did not serve as the major cue. The stressed vowel was even shorter when the word bears stress on the penultimate syllable. In terms of F0, peak alignment pattern conformed to the previous findings on other languages in that temporal coordination for L+H* was demarcated later than H*. However, the maximal pitch values of H* and L+H* did not differ much from each other. Further research will be done based on these findings.