Some studies of accentuation and juncture in Swedish

Earlier studies of perceived strength of phrase boundaries (Fant, Nord and Kruckenberg, 1986; Fant and Kruckenberg, 1989) are briefly reviewed. Results are discussed in terms of speaker variability, acoustic cues and the semantic expectancy of the occurrence of a juncture. More recent studies on stress and accentuation (Fant and Kruckenberg, 1994; Fant, Hertegård and Kruckenberg, 1996) have been followed up by a processing of continuous recordings of suband supraglottal pressures in the reading of a nine sentence paragraph of our standard prose text. A perceptual scaling of the perceived prominence of each syllable of the recorded speech was performed. A clear correlation with subglottal pressure was found in regions of high local prominence only. Some general observations on speaker variability in the realization of focal accentuation are reported.