14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Pitch Range Modelling: Linguistic Dimensions of Variation

David Patterson, D. Robert Ladd

University of Edinburgh, UK

This paper reports on a large scale study of pitch range variation across speakers. The experiment examined the relation between a model of pitch range based on pitch level and pitch span with the perception of speaker characteristics. The key to our measure of range is that it is based on clearly defined linguistic targets in speech. These targets included sentence initial peaks, accent peaks, post-accent valleys and sentence final lows. Our data are based on the ratings of 48 listeners judging 32 speakers of British English. The results show that a pitch range model based on linguistic dimensions of variation better captures variation in listeners' judgements than the well established measures based on speakers' long term distributional properties of F₀, such as &# 6; 2sds mean, 95th-5th percentile and 90th-10th percentile.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Patterson, David / Ladd, D. Robert (1999): "Pitch range modelling: linguistic dimensions of variation", In ICPhS-14, 1169-1172.