Prosodic organization of syllable prominence in two pronunciation variants of Russian

Abstract

The article is dedicated to a comparative study of the prosodic organization of syllable prominence in the South Russian and Moscow pronunciation variants of the Russian language. The study aims to determine how fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration are distributed within the phrase and the syllable, and how their interaction differs between the two variants. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that syllable prominence is examined not as a list of separate acoustic markers, but through a correlated description of their localization across phrasal zones, the degree of coordination, and intrasyllabic timing. The results establish that the South Russian phono-variant is characterized by a tighter correlation between F0 and intensity, the localization of the tonal maximum predominantly in the pre-nuclear region, and a more significant proportion of late intrasyllabic F0 peaks. Conversely, the Moscow phono-variant exhibits greater independence of prosodic parameters, a more mobile distribution of the tonal maximum throughout the phrase (including its shift to post-tonic and post-nuclear regions), and an earlier intrasyllabic localization of the F0 peak alongside a consistently late intensity maximum. It is shown that the similarity of the overall prosodic contour does not imply an identity of the mechanisms for forming syllable prominence. Future research prospects involve expanding the corpus, including other communicative types of utterances, conducting perceptual experiments, and further comparing a larger number of Russian pronunciation variants.

Research materials

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: April 3, 2026.
• Published: April 29, 2026.

Keywords

• просодическая организация речи
• слоговыделенность
• просодическая вариативность
• частота основного тона
• внутрислоговой тайминг
• prosodic organization of speech
• syllable prominence
• prosodic variability
• fundamental frequency
• intrasyllabic timing

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© 2026 The Author(s)
© 2026 Gramota Publishing, LLC

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