The perception of sentence stress in Malay and English

There is little research on stress and prominence in Bahasa Melayu (BM). Work which has been done on varieties of Malay concluded that pitch or durational differences do not contribute to the production or perception of stress. This study aimed to investigate the role of intensity in the perception of stress in BM among two groups of listeners, 16 native speakers of BM and 30 of BrE, in comparison with spoken British English (BrE) and Malay Speaker English (MSE). Listeners rated 30 low-pass filtered sentences, ten from each language, indicating all syllables they perceived as stressed. Comparisons of listener identification of stress with syllable intensity yielded no statistically significant difference in the BrE and MSE conditions. In the BM condition, BrE listeners rated significantly more syllables as stressed with low to mid intensity than the BM listeners. The results are discussed in terms of the contribution of intensity to perceived prominence in languages.