Acoustic correlates of prominence in Besemah (Malayic, Indonesia)

This paper examines the acoustic realization of word-level stress and phrase-level prominence (i.e., pitch-accents, boundary tones) in Besemah, a little-described Malayic language of southwest Sumatra, Indonesia. There has been much disagreement over the status of word-level stress in the languages of western Indonesia, particularly with regards to well-known varieties of Malay (i.e., Standard Malay-Indonesian). Utilizing acoustic cues, word-level stress has been claimed to be present by some (e.g., Adisasmito-Smith u0026 Cohn 1996), though studies involving perception experiments have questioned this position (e.g., van Zanten u0026 van Heuven 2004). All of these studies, however, are complicated by significant influence from substrate languages like Javanese, which apparently lack word-level stress (Goedemans u0026 van Zanten 2007). As a follow up to McDonnell (forthcoming), which found that word-level stress in Besemah falls on the final syllable of the word and is cued by increased intensity, the present study re...