The Acoustics of Word Stress in Swedish: A Function of Stress Level, Speaking Style and Word Accent

• The study presented here is one in a series of studies intended to describe the acoustics of word stress for several typologically different languages in a common framework. The idea is that, when fully developed the methodology should be applicable to any language in the same way regardless of prosodic type. The languages included in the present round of data collection and analyzes are Brazilian Portuguese, English, Estonian, French, Italian and Swedish. The acoustic variables examined here are F0-level, F0-variation, Duration, and Spectral Emphasis for all vowels in the data. All parameters are tested with respect to their correlation with stress level (primary, secondary, unstressed), speaking style (wordlist reading, phrase reading, spontaneous speech) and tonal word accent. The most robust results concerning stress level are found for Duration and F0-variation. Speaking style turned out to play a minimal role. The only robust effect was found for duration which was longer in word list reading. Word accent had a significant effect on F0-variation, and Duration.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

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