Recognizing and modelling regional varieties of Swedish

Our recent work within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish) includes two approaches. The first involves a pilot perception test, used for detecting tendencies in human clustering of Swedish dialects. 30 Swedish listeners were asked to identify the geographical origin of Swedish native speakers by clicking on a map of Sweden. Results indicate for example that listeners from the south of Sweden are better at recognizing some major Swedish dialects than listeners from the central part of Sweden, which includes the capital area. The second approach concerns a method for modelling intonation using the newly developed SWING (SWedish INtonation Generator) tool, where annotated speech samples are resynthesized with rule based intonation and audiovisually analysed with regards to the major intonational varieties of Swedish. We consider both approaches important in our aim to test and further develop the Swedish prosody model.