Perception and acoustic correlates of stress in English and in Bulgarian

The paper investigates the acoustic manifestations and the perception of stress by native English and native Bulgarian speakers. Analyses of the acoustic correlates of stress and results from a perception experiment suggest important differences in the way stress is signalled: except for F0 max, the values for which were bigger in Bulgarian, all other acoustic cues under investigation seemed to be less strong in Bulgarian, a language exhibiting features of both stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythmic organization, than in English, a language tending towards the stress-timed end of the rhythm scale.