14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
In this paper we present acoustical as well as lexical features
for classification purposes of perceived prominence in read
aloud Dutch sentences. Via a perception experiment with 10
naive listeners we derived prominence labels at the word level
for 500 sentences. Part of these sentences are used for
lexical/syntactical analyses. It turns out that most of the
function words are never perceived as prominent, and that
specific content words namely adverbs, nouns and adjectives
are almost always perceived with some degree of prominence,
whereas verbs form a middle class. So we decided to
concentrate on the lexically stressed syllables of content words,
because these are the words whose prominence is not uniquely
classified by their lexical class.
In this paper we use F0 range per syllable, both
raw and
corrected for the declination line, to distinguish between the
most prominent and non-prominent content words, although
intensity and duration features can be used as additional
features to improve the classification. As an initial result we
can conclude that F0 range is a very good feature to distinguish
between prominent and non-prominent content words.
Bibliographic reference. Streefkerk, Barbertje M. / Pols, Louis C. W. / Bosch, Louis ten (1999): "Towards finding optimal features of perceived prominence", In ICPhS-14, 1769-1772.