ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Rising pitch and quoted speech in everyday American English

Joseph Tyler

Phonetic variation in rising pitch has been analyzed for how it correlates with contextual factors like speaker gender, utterance type (questions vs. statements) and turn position (turn-medial vs. turn-final). This paper analyzes variation in terminal rising pitch between quoted and non-quoted speech, using data from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Results show rises in quoted speech start and end higher, rise more overall, but are no different in duration. These results are gender-dependent, however, for while women produce 65% of all rises in the corpus sample, they produce 100% (n=23) of the quoted speech rises.