Ebook: An acoustic study of tonal accent in Creek

International Journal of American Linguistics, 2002. - 33 p.Creek word prosody has received impressionistic phonetic description and occasional phonological attention, but to our knowledge has never been studied instrumentally.
1) Haas (1977a) treated word prosody in terms of ‘tonal accent’: the assignment of one of three phonemic tones to key syllables. Subsequent descriptions have attempted to reduce one of these tonal accents to stress. This paper reports acoustic findings obtained in a study of eight speakers (4 male and 4 female) of the Muskogee dialect of Creek. Creek word prosody displays declination and a phenomenon we refer to as ‘tone spacing’ (measured downstep).
2) provides a summary of Haas’s description and more recent, metrical approaches.
3) presents the results of our acoustic study.