Phonetic Interpretation of the Word Accent Contrast in Swedish: Evidence from Spontaneous Speech

Abstract Fundamental frequency (F₀) correlates of the Swedish tonal word accents, ‘grave’ and ‘acute’, were studied in spontaneous speech produced by 3 male speakers of Central Standard Swedish. The grave accent was invariably marked by an F₀ fall on the primary stress syllable, while the corresponding F₀ contour in acute words seemed to be predictable from sentence-level intonation. The latter observation, which could not be tested on the basis of spontaneous speech data, was confirmed in a companion paper in which a controlled speech material was analysed. In combination, the two papers corroborate the view that an F₀ fall is a positive phonetic feature of the grave accent, while the acute accent constitutes the unmarked member of the contrast. They also illustrate the methodological advantage of using complementary spontaneous and controlled speech materials.