Creak as a Feature of Lexical Stress in Estonian

In addition to typological, turn-taking or sociolinguistic factors, presence of creaky voice in spontaneous interaction is also influenced by the syntactic and phonological properties of speech. For example, creaky voice is reportedly more frequent in function words than content words, has been observed to accompany unstressed syllables and ends of phrases, and is associated with relaxation and reduced speech. In Estonian, creaky voice is frequently used by all speakers. In this paper, we observe the use of creaky voice in spontaneous Estonian in connection to syllabic properties of words, lexical stress, word class, lengthening, and timing in phrases. The results indicate that creak occurs less in syllables with primary stress than in unstressed syllables. However, syllables with secondary stress are most frequently creaky. In content words, the primary stressed syllables creak less frequently and unstressed syllables more frequently compared to function words. The stress-related pattern is similar in both function and content words, but more contrastive in content words. The probability of creakiness increases considerably with non-final lengthening within words, and for all syllables towards the end of the intonational phrase.