ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Perceptual significance of focus accent in spoken Swedish

Robert Bannert

An investigation was carried out aiming at establishing the certainty with which listeners can hear and identify focus accent in spoken Standard Swedish. A speech sample of two Stockholm speakers, one male and one female, was presented to a group of listeners who had to mark the most stressed word they heard in chunks of speech. In spite of a rather good agreement, the listeners showed a certain degree of variation. The acoustic correlates of the identified most stressed words were analysed.

Keywords: Focus accent, accentuation, perception, macro prosody, spoken Swedish