ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Perceptual Cues of Linguistic Stress: Intensity Revisited

Agaath M. C. Sluijter, Vincent J. van Heuven

Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics / Phonetics Laboratory, Leiden, The Netherlands

The general claim that intensity is a weak cue in the perception of stress is reconsidered. This claim is based on perception experiments in which intensity was varied in a naive way: all parts of the spectrum were increased with the same amount of energy. However, stressed syllables are produced with more vocal effort. If a speaker produces more vocal effort, higher frequencies increase more than lower frequencies. We show that the intensity differences as a function of stress are mainly located above 0.5 kHz. Varying intensity in this way would be much more realistic.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Sluijter, Agaath M. C. / Heuven, Vincent J. van (1993): "Perceptual cues of linguistic stress: intensity revisited", In Prosody-1993, 246-249.