Perception of tonal rises and falls for accentuation and phrasing in Swedish

In previous experiments with Dutch, French and Swedish listeners, it was shown that the location in the syllable of the onset of a rising or falling pitch movement is critical for the perception of accentuation. As the onset of the pitch movement is shifted through the syllable, there is a point at which the percept of accentuation shifts from one syllable to the next. This point is termed the accentuation boundary. It has also been proposed that in certain positions, the percept of accentuation conflicts with the percept of phrasing. An experiment with Swedish listeners was carried out using the same stimuli as used for the accentuation study, but now the task was to determine the phrasing of the syllables. The results indicate that perceptual phrase boundaries can be determined in the same way as accentuation boundaries. Differences in the locations of the boundaries can be interpreted in terms of strengths of tonal cues for accentuation and phrasing.