Primary and secondary stress in Italian and German. Position, weight-sensitivity and acoustic correlates

This dissertation aims, on the one hand, at investigating primary and secondary stress assignment in Italian and German, specifically with respect to the influence of syllable weight; on the other hand, it aims at investigating the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in the same two languages. In order to analyze primary and secondary stress assignment and the influence of syllable weight, for each of the investigated languages, a nonce word experiment and a corpus analysis have been carried out, analyzing how primary and secondary stress position is influenced by a variety of syllable structures.The results indicate that, both in Italian and German, syllable weight plays a role with respect to primary and secondary stress assignment, although in different ways between the two languages. In order to analyze the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress, for each of the investigated languages, a production experiment has been conducted. The results indicate that in, the case of Italian, duration and F1 can be considered reliable correlates of primary stress, while F0 might be considered a reliable correlate of secondary stress. In the case of German, duration, F0, F1 and F2 can be considered reliable correlates of both primary and secondary stress, while spectral tilt can be considered a reliable correlate only of primary stress.