Prominence, Sentence Stress, and Intonation

This post focuses on prominence and sentence stress, with a little bit of a look at intonation. For this I put the clip into Praat so that I could visualize it, and I’ve posted this visualization here. I noticed a few things as I listened, following along in Praat:

• Due to the audio quality, some of the pitch movement is hard to see, but Praat confirmed that he doesn’t do a lot of pitch movement except on stressed words.
• Stressed words tended to fall early in sentences, while the end of sentences tended to be faster and less stressed. Recognizing this pattern helped me to feel the rhythm of his speech more clearly as well. Some examples are “deny anything”, “what we realized”, and “71 gangs”. These phrases come early in their sentences, while the rest of the sentence gets much less stress.

I practiced these as I made the following recording, though as I listened back to it, I think some of the other aspects of the accent were not as clear.

Next time I’ll work more specifically on intonation, as well as tying all of the features together.

Here's the Praat data that I was working from.