Acoustic changes in the production of lexical stress during Lombard speech

Abstract

The Lombard effect describes the phenomenon of individuals increasing their vocal intensity when speaking in the presence of background noise. Here, we conducted an investigation of the production of lexical stress during Lombard speech. Participants (N= 27) produced the same sentences in three conditions: One quiet condition and two noise conditions at 70 dB (white noise; multi-talker babble). Manual acoustic analyses (syllable duration, vowel intensity, and vowel fundamental frequency) were completed for repeated productions of two trisyllabic words with opposing patterns of lexical stress (weak-strong; strong-weak) in each of the three conditions. In total, 324 productions were analysed (..