Physiological and Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Stress

In speech production, syllables that are stressed differ from those that are unstressed along at least four parameters: duration, fundamental frequency, overall intensity, and spectral composition. This paper reviews acoustic and physiological studies concerned with these features and how they might be accounted for by a single physiological mechanism. The perception of stress is then considered in the context of recent experiments that manipulated these parameters either singly or multi-dimensionally. The results of this line of experimentation suggest that the perception of stress, like its production, is related to a complex of acoustic features.