ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006

Voice source correlates of prosodic features in american English: a pilot study

Markus Iseli, Yen-Liang Shue, Melissa A. Epstein, Patricia Keating, Jody Kreiman, Abeer Alwan

In this paper, we examine the dependencies of voice source parameters F0(fundamental frequency), Ee(maximal glottal flow change), RK(glottal symmetry/skew), LIN(value related to source spectral tilt) and H.1 - H.2 (difference of formant-corrected magnitudes of the first two source spectral harmonics) on prosodic features such as pitch accents, stress, and sentence type and the interdependencies of some of these measures. A small, carefully designed corpus containing a sentence in different prosodic configurations was used in this study. Statistical analysis was performed using two-way ANOVAs to test for the voice source parameter dependencies. Results show that F0 is positively correlated with Ee and LIN, and negatively correlated with H.1 - H.2 . Stressed syllables showed lower values of RK and H.1 - H.2 compared to stressless syllables. The effect of pitch accent can be seen as a combination of its F0, and stress. Phrase-final syllables for interrogative sentences yielded a higher F0 and lower RK and H.1 - H.2 compared to declarative sentences. It was found that it is important to differentiate between tones when analyzing prosodic features that involve tones, such as pitch accent and probably boundary.