Contextual influences on the realisation of English compound stress

Compound nouns have been the subject of numerous investigations, their stress pattern being an area which has been well researched. One area which has so far been lacking in any substantial research is the effect that context has on the stress in compound nouns. Using 20 compounds taken from the British National Corpus, an acoustic analysis of readings of each compound in three sentence positions was conducted, looking specifically at the effects of sentence position on duration and fundamental frequency. The results suggest that sentence position does effect the acoustic correlates of stress, especially on the duration of the second constituent of left and right stressed compounds, and on the difference in mean and maximum pitch between the first and second constituents of left stressed compounds. The data also suggests that in right stressed compounds, duration is a more reliable acoustic cue of stress pattern than pitch.