The relationship between acoustic stress and information content of words is investigated. On one side, the average acoustic stress is measured for each word throughout each utterance. On the other side an Information Retrieval (IR) index, based on word frequency throughout the particular spoken sentence and throughout the collection of analysed spoken sentences, is calculated. The scatter plots of the two measures (average acoustic stress on the Ý-axis and IR index on the Ü-axis) show higher

more »

... lues of average acoustic stress with the increasing of the IR index of the word in the majority of the analysed utterances. A statistically more valid proof of such a relationship is derived from the histogram of the words with high average acoustic stress vs. the IR index. This confirms that a word with high average acoustic stress has also a high value of the IR index and, if we trust IR indexes, also high informative content.