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