Metrical prominence in hidatsa: an acoustic and phonological analysis

Various researchers have claimed that Hidatsa is a pitch-accent language or a stress-accent language. Park (2012) claimed that Hidatsa is a pitch-accent language and Boyle et.al (2016) claimed that stress does not correlate with pitch (F0) but rather duration, vowel quality and amplitude are all markers for stress. My main goal in this thesis is to use phonetic instrumentation to determine what phonetic properties (F0, amplitude, and duration) are revealed and if they coincide with accent placement in Hidatsa. My findings show that words in isolation incorporate the phonetic properties (F0, amplitude, and duration) of a pitch accent system. These findings can now be a part of the larger scope in Siouan languages such as Crow, a pitch accent language (C. Golston, personal communication, November, 20, 2016.) and Lakota where F0 is a primary marker for stress along with other phonetic properties (Mirzayan, 2010).