Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Syllable Prominence in Spanish

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 compares traditional parameters modified by focus and sentence mode like fundamental frequency, syllabic durations and intensity against Fujisaki model accent command parameters. Listeners identified narrow focus correctly but only one third of utterances with no focus. Ratings of perceived prominence are moderately correlated with most prosodic parameters. The proportion rate of syllable duration to the underlying accent command duration resulted to be the parameter combination that best correlates to prominence. A simple classifier based on a regression model is presented to detect prominences automatically. This model could explain up to 60% of the observed variance.