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

The Influence of the Segment Context on the Realisation of Rising F₀ Patterns in Russian

Nina B. Volskaya

Saint-Petersburg State University, Department of Phonetics, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

In the experiments reported we have tried to explore the influence of the segmental environment of the accented vowel on the realization of the rising pitch contours in Russian. A number of mono- and twosyllable words with different types of syllables were selected for the purpose. The the stressed and unstressed syllable codas and onsets consisted of one consonant belonging to different phonetic classes. They included voiceless, nonsonorant voiced and sonorant consonants:

   1. a final stressed syllable of the V+C (voiceless) type;
   2. a final stressed syllable of the V+C (sonorant) type
   3. post-stressed syllables of the C (voiceless) +V type;
   4. post-stressed syllables of the C (sonorant) +V type;
   5. stressed syllables with sonorant onsets and codas.

Evidence from our experiments on modelling F₀ for synthesis shows that there are differences in F₀ alignment due to different segmental content. The results of the perceptual evaluation of the rising contours synthesized with regard to the phonetic make-up of the accented and unaccented syllables may help to improve the quality of the synthesized speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Volskaya, Nina B. (1999): "The influence of the segment context on the realisation of rising F₀ patterns in Russian", In ICPhS-14, 1985-1988.