Distinction between 'normal' and 'contrastive/emphatic' focus

Abstract

A method to extract and classify focus accents has been developed. It works for German spontaneous speech.The method tries to distinguish 'normal' and 'contrastive/emphatic' focus accents using phrase boundaries. It was found that contrastive/emphatic accents tend to have greater distances to phrase boundaries than normal focus accents. Moreover, for contrastive/emphatic accents there was found a much steeper F_{0} rise for accents with a rather high distance from the next phrase boundary.