Focal lengthening in assertions and confirmations

This paper reports on duration measurements in a corpus of 270 utterances by 9 Standard Swedish speakers, where focus position is varied systematically in two different speech acts: as-sertions and confirmations. The goal is to pro-vide information needed for the construction of a perception experiment, which will test the hypothesis that Swedish has a paradigmatic contrast between a rising and a falling utter-ance-level accent, which are both capable of signalling focus, the falling one being expected in confirmations. The results of the present study are in line with this hypothesis, since they show that focal lengthening occurs in both assertions and confirmations, even if the target word is produced with a falling pattern