Spectral Slope Parameters and Detection of Word Stress

Phonetic research in the past decades has exerted a great effort to describe the principles of relative prominence in speech. The importance of this issue is felt in many areas of both pure and applied phonetics spilling over to the fields of speech technology, where prominence can help to disambiguate words in recognition tasks or make synthesized speech more natural, convincing and unequivocal, the field of didactics, where it can, for instance, help students of foreign languages to acquire better pronunciation, or the field of forensic science, where it can help to establish affective state of the speaker or his/her individual habits in accenting parts of linguistic messages in order to check the identity. These are just a few examples from a large pool of possibilities.