The investigation of lexical stress has traditionally been limited to stressed syllable nuclei. Vowels are longer, louder, and less reduced when stressed, and they are produced with faster and larger articulatory movements. In a series of recent studies (1, 2, 3), we have shown that lexical stress also modulates the acoustic properties and the articulation of post-tonic velar obstruents. These results suggest that a full understanding of the phonetics and phonology of stress should also look outside the boundaries of the stressed syllable. During this talk, we will present our research investigating the articulatory and perceptual consequences of lexical stress on post-tonic obstruents. First, we present a new articulatory study which extends our findings on velar obstruents to bilabial and alveolar stops in Italian. Second, we present a set of perceptual studies showing that lexical stress increases the availability of perceptual cues to consonantal contrasts, and we investigate the perceptual underpinnings of these effects.

[1] Shao, B., Hermes, A., Buech, P., Giavazzi, M. (2025). Articulatory spill-over effects of lexical stress in Italian and their phonological implications. Journal of Phonetics, Volume 108, 101371.

[2] Shao, B., Buech, P., Hermes, A., Giavazzi M. (2023). Lexical stress and velar palatalization in Italian: A spatio-temporal interaction. Interspeech2023. Dublin, Ireland, 1833-1837.

[3] Shao, B., Buech, P., Hermes, A., Giavazzi M. (2023). Stress conditioned phonological process: a case study of Italian palatalization. (ICPhS XX), Prague, Czech Republic, 2189-2193.