Wug-testing phonetic prominence in Munster Irish

Abstract

8 speakers of Munster Irish were presented with a series of disyllabic nonwords and directed to read them aloud in a carrier phrase. Each nonword corresponded to a different pairing of syllable weights (e.g. light-heavy, heavy-light), said to determine lexical stress placement in the variety. A binomial logistic regression examined phonetic measures of prominence as predictors of syllable location, and mixed-effect multiple linear regressions evaluated weight-pairings as predictors of cross-syllable change in the same measures. Results suggest a great deal of inter- and intraspeaker variation, and no clear role of weight in determining assignment of prominence. This is relevant for work on the complex stress system typically attributed to Munster Irish, and for critical examinations of stress description beyond Irish.