ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

Empirical validation of hand-labelled nuclear accent patterns

Esther Grabe, Greg P. Kochanski, John Coleman

In a corpus containing speech data from seven dialects of English, we hand-labelled over 700 nuclear accents and identified seven accent types. Then we used four-term mathematical models to describe the fundamental frequency patterns associated with the accents. A statistical analysis showed that the models for six of the seven accents differed significantly from each other. Our hand-labels were associated with consistently different f0 patterns.