Abstract
Objective and subjective measurements of syllabic stress in reading of a Swedish novel have been performed. Our data bank contains material from 16 speakers. Measurements of durations and local pitch variations correlate well with the direct subjective estimate of stress. A comparison is made of subjects' introspective grading of stress from silent reading and their ability to discriminate individually produced stress patterns. The top-down influence is partial only. Statistics of interstress intervals show that relations between interval durations and the number of phonemes in an interval display speaker-specific characteristics. Moreover, the average of stress intervals not spanning across syntactic boundaries constitutes a rhythmical time constant of the order of 0.5 s in the planning of pauses, such that the sum of physical pause plus terminal lengthening tends towards an integral multiple, 1, 2, or 3, of the time constant. These data support and extend the model of W. A. Lea [Trends in Speech Recognition (Prentice-Hall, London, 1980)]. [Work supported by the Swedish Board for Technical Development and The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.]
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