On the reliability of overall intensity and spectral emphasis as acoustic correlates of focal accents in Swedish

This study shows that increases in overall intensity and spectral emphasis are reliable acoustic correlates of focal accents in Swedish. They are both reliable in the sense that there are statistically significant differences between focally accented words and nonfocal ones for a variety of words, in any position of the phrase and for all speakers in the analyzed materials, and in the sense of their being useful for automatic detection of focal accents. Moreover, spectral emphasis turns out to be the more reliable correlate, as the influence on it of position in the phrase, word accent and vowel height was less pronounced and as it proved a better predictor of focal accents in general and for a majority of the speakers. Finally, the study has resulted in data for overall intensity and spectral emphasis that might prove important in modeling for speech synthesis.

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