The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

11 Feb 2003

Hannele Nicholson & Andreas Hilmo Teig


How to tell beans from farmers: Cues to the Perception of pitch accent in whispered Norwegian

East Norwegian employs pitch accent contours in order to make lexical distinctions. This paper researches listeners' ability to make lexical distinctions in the absence of f0 (ie. whispered speech) as the listener attempts to determine which pitch accent word token best fits into a whispered ambiguous utterance in spoken Norwegian. The results confirm that syntactic context alone is not a reliable cue to assist in lexical selection and concur with Fintoft (1970) in suggesting that listeners utilise a separate prosodic cue, possibly syllable duration or intensity, to make the pitch accent distinction in whispered speech.

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