Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Syllable Prominence in Spanish

JORGE GURLEKIAN; HANSJÖRG MIXDORFF ; HUMBERTO TORRES; CHRISTIAN COSSIO-MERCADO; DIEGO EVIN

Boston

Congreso; Speech Prosody 2016; 2016

Boston College

This paper explores the relationship between perceived syllable prominence and the acoustic properties of a speech utterance. It is aimed at establishing a link between the linguistic meaning of an utterance in terms of sentence modality and focus with its underlying prosodic features. Our acoustic analysis confirms earlier results in that focus and sentence mode modify the fundamental frequency contour, syllabic durations and intensity. Narrow focus was identified correctly but only one third of utterances with neutral focus were identified as such. Ratings of syllable prominence are moderately correlated with command amplitude, syllable duration and command area. The proportion rate of syllable duration to the underlying accent command duration  resulted to be the parameter combination that best correlates to prominence.  A regression model could explain up to 60% of the variance when this proportion is combined with F0 and the accent command area.