Distinction between `normal´ and `contrastive/emphatic´ focus

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 F₀ rise for accents with a rather high distance from the next phrase boundary