Acoustic-phonetic Analysis of Prominence in Swedish

The purpose of our contribution is to introduce subjectively scaled prominence as a reference for studies of the realisation of prosodic events, applicable to the relative weight of syllables and words as well as to the perceived distinctiveness of junctures and other grouping phenomena. The prominence scaling fulfils the need of a descriptive level interfacing prosodic phonological categories and acoustic correlates which allows the establishment of quantified relations between continuously scaled acoustic attributes and continuously scaled response categories. An example is to study how the prominence of a syllable increases with increments of each of a number of relevant acoustic parameters. This tool accordingly adds to the evaluation of prosodie features and has obvious applications in speech synthesis. (1997) have adopted the scaling method of (1989) in the development of a prominence-based synthesis system. Some suggestions for prominence based synthesis-by- rule of Swedish appear in a recent report by (1998).

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