15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


The Perception of Preheads as Accents

Toni Rietveld, Carlos Gussenhoven

Nijmegen University, The Netherlands

An experiment is reported on the perceived accentuation of words preceding the accent in H*L L% sequences, assumed to be due to a %L boundary tone and referred to as 'prehead'. Four factors were hypothesized to affect the perception of accent on the first word of the utterance: the F0 of %L, the temporal distance between %L and the following H*, the F0 of the peak for the following H* accent and the grammatical status of the word in the prehead. A perception experiment with speech in which the F0-contours were manipulated with the help of PSOLA showed that the F0 of %L and the grammatical status of the word in the prehead have significant effects on perceived accentuation. In addition, a significant effect of the interaction between distance and F0 of %L was found.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Rietveld, Toni / Gussenhoven, Carlos (2003): "The perception of preheads as accents", In ICPhS-15, 759-762.