Word stress correlates in spontaneous child-directed speech in German

In this paper we focus on the use of acoustic as well as voice quality parameters to mark word stress in German. Our aim was to identify the speech parameters parents use to indicate word stress differences to their children. Therefore, mothers and their children were recorded during a period of at least one year while they performed a special playing task using word pairs that differ only in the position of word stress. The recorded target words were analyzed acoustically and with respect to voice quality. The results presented here concern the mothers' productions of contrastive word stress, and we discuss our findings with respect to the results of previous studies investigating word stress. Our results provide further insight into the process of word stress acquisition in German.