What is invariant and what is optional in the realization of a FOCUSED word? A cross-dialectal study of Swedish sentences with moving focus

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems handle continuous speech and are speaker-independent. However, the linguistic information conveyed in the intonational contour is neglected. To be able to fully recognize speech, this information must be interpreted. To this end, explicit knowledge of dialectal and individual variation is required. Some acoustic correlates of wh-focus in three Swedish dialects are described. Variation within and between dialects is accounted for, as well as individual differences and optional phenomena