Acoustic correlates of emphasis in Estonian

The paper tests for several potential acoustic correlates of the emphatic accent differentiating between broad focus and clause-final narrow focus in Estonian. The examined correlates were related to F0, duration, intensity and spectral emphasis. Interestingly, duration was found to be by far the strongest correlate of emphasis, whereas crosslinguistically emphasis has been found to be expressed primarily with F0. Since duration relationships in the disyllabic foot play an important role in Estonian word prosody, being the primary correlate of the Estonian three-way quantity system, the study additionally examined the interaction of emphatic lengthening with word quantity. It was found that emphatic lengthening does not affect the quantity features, but depends on the quantity structure of the word, affecting primarily the segment that bears the quantity. 1