The role of stress and accent in the perception of speech rhythm

Abstract

Modelling rhythmic characteristics of speech is expected to contribute to the acceptability of synthetic speech. However, before rules for the control of speech rhythm in synthetic speech can be developed, we need to know which properties of speech give rise to the perception of speech rhythm. An experiment is described which investigates how the distributions of stressed syllables and pitch accents contribute to the perceived rhythmicity of speech. The outcomes show that the perception of rhythm is related to the distribution of locally prominent syllables: primarily to accents, but also to stressed syllables in long stretches of speech without accented syllables. Furthermore, it appears that, once a rhythmic pattern has been established by the initial part of an utterance, listeners are quite tolerant of local deviations from this pattern later on in the utterance.