Acoustic correlates of linguistic stress and accent in Dutch and American English

In the literature the same acoustic correlates of stress and accent have been established for Dutch and English, i.e. F0 movement, duration, intensity and vowel quality. A.M.C. Sluijter and V.J. Van Heuven (1996) showed that F0 movement and overall intensity in Dutch differentiate only between accented and non-accented syllables, rather than between stressed and unstressed. The most reliable acoustic correlates of stress were duration and high frequency emphasis. Vowel quality differed significantly only in lexical items, but was only a weak correlate in reiterant speech copies. We reconsider the acoustical correlates of stress and accent in American English (AE) and compare the results with the Dutch results. We offer an analysis of the discriminating strength of the parameters in an attempt to optimally distinguish initial and final stressed tokens by machine, using LDA.