An Acoustic Study of the Stress and Intonational System in Lakhota: A Preliminary Report

This paper reports a preliminary result of an acoustic study on the stress and intonational system in Lakhota, a native American language. It investigates how the stress and intonation in Lakhota are phonetically manifested; and how the stress interacts with other prosodic factors. The results preliminarily obtained from one native Lakhota speaker suggest that the primary cue of the stress is relatively high F0 which is often accompanied by higher intensity (for the vowel) and longer VOT (for aspirated stops). The results also indicate that stress is not reliably marked by duration. The stress system, however, interacts with the intonational pattern, such that, for example, intonational peak falls on the stressed syllable with a general pattern of L+H* and that it interacts with the boundary tone L%, resulting in mid tone utterance-finally. This paper can be viewed largely as a qualitative study on an understudied native American language, Lakhota and as forming a basis for further development of its stress and intonation system whose acoustic properties of its prosodic system have not been investigated before.