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This dissertation investigates the syllable structure and stress patterns of Sindhi words through the analysis of behavioral data from speech judgment experiments, and of acoustic data from speech production experiments, conducted with native speakers of Sindhi. There were three basic queries, the first of which was: What is the syllable structure? For this, a syllable judgment study was designed to explore syllable structure in Sindhi indigenous words and English loanwords. Syllable counts and syllabification judgments were elicited from native speakers for words presented in written format. This syllable judgment study sought to determine native speakers’ intuitions about the syllabification of Sindhi words in terms of the major principles: Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) and Maximal Onset Principle (MOP) of syllabification, and phonotactic constraints of the language, referencing to consonant clusters syllable-initially, -medially, and -finally. On the basis of the data, the study devised an algorithm for syllabification that illustrates how a Sindhi word is syllabified. Secondly, it investigates the word-level stress patterns in Sindhi and identifies the phonological factors that determine stress location in polysyllabic words. This study also examines the intuition of native speakers by eliciting their judgments about the location of lexical stress in words of two, three, four and five syllables from 150 selected words. The findings from the stress judgment study shows that native speakers have a preference for identifying stress on a heavy syllable. This pattern is strongest in words that have a single heavy syllable. In words with multiple heavy syllables the pattern is less clear. In tri-syllabic words there appears to be a preference for stress on the leftmost heavy syllable, while four-syllable words do not show this pattern as clearly. However, five-syllable words, show a preference for lexical stress on the penultimate syllable, which does not seem to depend on syllable weight. From these data the study concludes that Sindhi is not a fixed stress language. The location of stress varies in words according to the weight of the syllables in the word. This study concludes that Sindhi is a weak quantity-sensitive language and it is not a fixed stress language. Third question investigated here is what are the acoustic correlates of word level stress in Sindhi? This work collects and examines quantitative acoustic data (2000 voice samples of Sindhi speech) from ten native speakers. From the physical examination of stressed and unstressed vocalic sounds, the study found strong evidence that several phonetic properties are altered by word-level stress in Sindhi. The speech materials used in the acoustic analysis are ten minimal stress pairs of words that differ primarily in the location of stress (first vs. second syllable). The test words were all highly familiar words selected and chosen to minimize segmental variation among the words. The acoustic analysis of productions of these 20 words is based on measures of fundamental frequency (F0), vowel formants (F1 and F2) as a measure of vowel quality and vowel duration. In addition, the stop closure duration of the word-initial onset consonant for stressed and unstressed syllables was also measured. The results show strong evidence that stressed syllables have higher F0, F1 and F2, and greater duration values as compared to unstressed syllables. In addition, the study undertook another experiment of preliminary intonational aspects of Sindhi in order to investigate the role of pitch between stress and intonation of contrastive focus accentual phrase in Sindhi, F0 of vowel pitch contours were analyzed for evidence that the location of the beginning of the pitch rise, or the pitch peak varies in relation to the location of the stressed syllable in the word. Sindhi pitch accent rises from the first syllable in disyllable words, irrespective of syllable weight, and the rise is followed by a fall at end of the word. Thus, it was observed, there was a rise and fall in intonation of contrastive focus accentual phrase. A peak occurs on the second or third syllable and may span over two syllables in longer words.
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