F0 Curves Research Articles

English Prosodic Focus Marking by Cantonese Trilingual Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The current study investigated English prosodic focus marking by autistic and typically developing (TD) Cantonese trilingual children, and examined the potential differences in this regard compared to native English-speaking children. Forty-eight participants were recruited with 16 speakers for each of the three groups (Cantonese-speaking autistic [CASD], Cantonese-speaking TD [CTD], and English-speaking TD [ETD] children), and prompt questions were designed to elicit desired focus type (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). Mean duration, mean fundamental frequency (F0), F0 range, mean intensity, and F0 curves were used as the acoustic correlates for linear mixed-effects model fitting and functional data analyses in relation to groups and focus conditions (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive pre-, on-, and post-focus). The CTD group had post-focus compression (PFC) patterns via reducing mean duration, narrowing F0 range, and lowering mean F0, F0 curve, and mean intensity for words under both narrow and contrastive post-focus conditions, while the CASD group only had shortened mean duration and lowered F0 curves. However, neither the CTD group nor CASD group showed much of on-focus expansion (OFE) patterns. The ETD group marked OFE by increasing mean duration, mean F0, mean intensity, and higher F0 curve for words under on-focus conditions. The CTD group utilized more acoustic cues than the CASD group when it comes to PFC. The ETD group differed from the CASD and CTD groups in the use of OFE. Furthermore, both the CASD and CTD groups showed positive first language transfer in the use of duration and intensity and, potentially, successful acquisition in the use of F0 for prosodic focus marking. Meanwhile, the differences in the use of OFE between the Cantonese-speaking and English-speaking groups, not PFC, might indicate that Cantonese-speaking children acquire PFC prior to OFE.

The effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on incomplete tonal neutralization.

We investigated the effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on the acoustic realization of two neutralizing falling tones in Dalian Mandarin Chinese. Monosyllabic morphemes containing the target tones (Tone 1 and Tone 4) were produced by 60 native speakers from two generations (middle-aged vs. young). The duration of tone-bearing syllable rhymes, as well as the F0 curves and velocity profiles of the lexical tones were quantitatively analyzed via linear mixed-effects modeling and functional data analysis. Results showed no durational difference between T1 and T4. However, the F0 contours of the two falling tones were incompletely neutralized for both young and middle-aged speakers. Lexical frequency showed little effect on the incomplete tonal neutralization; there were significant differences in the turning point of the two falling tones in syllables with both high and low lexical frequency. However, homophone neighborhood density showed an effect on the incomplete neutralization between the two falling tones, reflected in significant differences in the slope and turning point of the F0 velocity profiles between the two tones carried by syllables with low density but not with high density. Moreover, homophone neighborhood density also affected the duration, the turning point of F0 curves, and velocity profiles of the T1- and T4-syllables. These results are discussed with consideration of social phonetic variations, the theory of Hypo- and Hyper-articulation (H&H), the Neighborhood Activation Model, and communication-based information-theoretic accounts. Collectively, these results broaden our understanding of the effects that lexical properties have on the acoustic details of lexical tone production and tonal sound changes.

Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study

AbstractAsia Minor Greek (AMG) speakers cohabited with Turkish speakers for eight hundred years until the 1923 Lausanne Convention, which forced a two-way mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece and severed their everyday contact. We compare the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of first-generation AMG speakers born in Turkey with three subsequent generations born in Greece. We examine how long contact effects in intonation persist after contact has ceased, through comparison of the f0 patterns in four generations of AMG speakers with those of their Athenian Greek- and Turkish-speaking contemporaries. The speech of the first-generation of AMG speakers exhibits two patterns in the f0 curve shape and time alignment of the continuation rises, one Athenian-like and one Turkish-like. Over subsequent generations use of the latter diminishes, while the Athenian pattern becomes more frequent, indicating intergenerational change.

Consonantal F0 perturbation in American English involves multiple mechanisms.

In this study, we revisit consonantal perturbation of F0 in English, taking into particular consideration the effect of alignment of F0 contours to segments and the F0 extraction method in the acoustic analysis. We recorded words differing in consonant voicing, manner of articulation, and position in syllable, spoken by native speakers of American English in both statements and questions. In the analysis, we compared methods of F0 alignment and found that the highest F0 consistency occurred when F0 contours were time-normalized to the entire syllable. Applying this method, along with using syllables with nasal consonants as the baseline and a fine-detailed F0 extraction procedure, we identified three distinct consonantal effects: a large but brief (10-40 ms) F0 raising at voice onset regardless of consonant voicing, a smaller but longer-lasting F0 raising effect by voiceless consonants throughout a large proportion of the following vowels, and a small lowering effect of around 6 Hz by voiced consonants, which was not found in previous studies. Additionally, a brief anticipatory effect was observed before a coda consonant. These effects are imposed on a continuously changing F0 curve that is either rising-falling or falling-rising, depending on whether the carrier sentence is a statement or a question.

Formal intonative analysis

There is a general consensus among scholars that one same sentence can be said in different ways. This consensus, however, falls apart when the issues are discussed related to the efficiency of prosody in allowing us to say the very same sequence of segments with different meanings. According to Hirst (1987) e t’Hartet. al. (1990) the difficulties of transcribing prosody overcome the difficulties of transcribing the segmental. They argue that in order to investigate how the melody contributes to the overall understanding of an enunciation a metalanguage was required through which the phenomenon can be discussed. The vocabulary of this metalanguage must consist of appropriate descriptive units through which it is possible to speak of entities and structures at various levels of observation. The semi-automatic analysis, by means of the programs MOMEL and INTSINT, was used in the description of some intonational languages such as: French (di Cristo, 2011), British English (Auran, Bouzon and Hirst, 2004; Brierley, 2011) and analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese rhythm by means of manual INTSINT (Gonçalves, 2000). The present study aims to determine if the program of semi-automatic intonational analysis - INTSINT - is capable of reproduce melodic variation trends of the Brazilian Portuguese. In our proposal, the effectiveness of the program to differentiate between declarative and interrogative forms during reading was evaluated. The following hypotheses were raised: (I) the analysis of intonation with the program INTSINT allows the choice of different phonological theories regarding the use of entonative units;(II) it is possible to distinguish between declarative and interrogative forms by means of coded target points to Brazilian Portuguese. An explanatory analysis of the codification performed by MOMELINTSINT was performed. The corpus of this study consists of 10 short texts, with approximately five sentences that were read by 10 people of the female sex, aged 20-30 years. The acoustic analysis of the data was performed using the program Praatversion 4.4.27, available at www.praat.org (Weenink and Boersma, 1997 ,i contains the necessary extensions for the implementation of the programs MOMEL / INTSINT. These last ones are freely available on the site http://aune.lpl.univaix.fr/~auran/english/ressources.html. The high beginning was common for the declarative and interrogative modalities. This fact was represented by the first target point, coded as T, or the second target point, coded as M; but followed by H, T or U. Nevertheless, they differ at the end of the unit: in interrogative sentences, a sharp increase represented by the symbols T and H can be observed just before the final fall. In declarative sentences it is possible to perceive a rise is followed by a downfall, but not as much and not as systematically as in the interrogative sentences. Far from closing the discussion on intonation units and in the chosen modalities for this study,our initial goal of evaluating the behavior of the program INTSINT against pitch variations was reached. We conclude that the program INTSINT is able to transmit trends and also the general melodic pattern of F0 curve.

On (and off) ramps in intonational phonology: Rises, falls, and the Tonal Center of Gravity

Two conflicting views have been advanced of what defines ‘default’ high pitch accents in various West Germanic languages, including English: One equates these accents fundamentally with a rise to a high turning point, while the other focuses on the fall from it. Both views arise from the assumption within Autosegmental-Metrical theory that the phonological representations of intonational categories can be discerned more-or-less directly from the string of intentional-seeming changes of direction in the F0 curve, identified as production ‘targets’. Two perceptual experiments reveal that, at least in American English, this view critically oversimplifies how pitch accents containing High tones are defined and distinguished: instead, both the shape of the rise and the shape of the fall are seen to contribute to the alignment of the overall bulk of the high region, defined by the rise-fall shape, with the segmental string, and thus to its categorization by listeners as an early, mid or late rise-fall (H + !H*, L + H*, or L* + H). These findings are consistent with the view that the Tonal Center of Gravity (TCoG) of the rise-fall shape as a whole, rather than an F0 turning point per se, is what speakers align with segmental content to distinguish different pitch accent categories. Questioning the primacy of the turning points as the phonetic targets for these pitch accents, in turn, seriously problematizes standard assumptions about the nature of phonological representations of intonation and their relation to the signal.

An SS ANOVA (Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance) study of high tone lowering in Tsua

This article examines the acoustic phonetic properties of consonant-tone interaction in the Khoisan language, Tsua, using speech production data from original field research in Botswana. The Tsua tonal melodies with Fundamental Frequency (F0) shapes having the most extreme excursions are the result of a rare consonant-tone interaction pattern with depressor types found in both African and East Asian tone languages. The Tsua depressor types are voiced obstruents, aspirated obstruents and the glottal fricative /h/. Statistical analysis via Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance (SS ANOVA) reveals two striking generalisations: (i) only root-initial High tones followed by a non-High tone are depressed; and (ii) the overall shapes of the F0 curves are more important for tone melody identification than whether they are produced at a slightly higher or lower Hertz value, even if the difference is statistically significant. The first finding reflects the context-dependent nature of Tsua tonal depression. The second stands in contrast to studies of other tone systems that suggest the relative Hertz differential between adjacent tones is more important for identification. These findings expand our knowledge of tonal phonetics by showing what is possible in a typologically rare tone system, and highlight the importance of statistical methods in phonetic fieldwork.

Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites

This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of single and Double Negation (DN) readings of English negative indefinites in question–answer pairs. Productions of four negative words (no one, nobody, nothing, and nowhere) were elicited from 20 native English speakers as responses to negative questions such as “What didn't you eat?” in contexts designed to generate either a single negation reading or a logically affirmative DN reading. A control condition with no negation in the question was employed for comparison. A verification question following each item determined whether tokens were interpreted as expected and, therefore, produced with the target interpretation. Statistical analysis of the f0 curves revealed a significant difference: DN is associated with a higher fundamental frequency than single negation. In contrast, the single negative and control conditions were not significantly different with respect to f0. Analysis of the verification question responses showed significant differences between all three conditions (Control > DN > single negation), suggesting that single negation is more difficult to interpret than DN as a response to a negative question. The results are compared with previous work on Romance, and we demonstrate how English behaves like a prototypical Negative Concord language in that DN is the prosodically marked form.

Quantifying the manipulation of F0 as an acoustic correlate of stress in Rebkong Amdo Tibetan

Quantifying the manipulation of F0 as an acoustic correlate of stress in Rebkong Amdo Tibetan Rebkong Amdo is a non-tonal variety of Tibetan spoken in Rebkong County, Qinghai Province, PRC. Speakers draw on varied acoustic resources to convey stress in disyllabic words, which are highly frequent in the language. Non-verbs (nouns, adjectives, and numerals) are stressed on the second syllable (S2); the primary acoustic correlate of stress is F0. Verbs are stressed on the first syllable (S1); stress is conveyed by both intensity and F0. For non-verbs, speakers manipulate F0 in different ways to convey S2 prominence. The pitch contour may (a) be flat in both syllables but higher in S2; (b) be flat or slope gently in S1 but fall sharply in S2; or (c) be generally flat in S1 but define a prominent arcing curve in S2. These three patterns, which occur in free variation, require different analytical approaches in order to quantify relative acoustic prominence across syllables: (a) mean F0 (Hz) is measured for each syllable; (b) pitch slope (in Hz/100 ms) is measured for each syllable; (c) F0 curves are characterized using a principal components analysis, and by determining the tonal center of gravity. In each approach, measurements are paired to determine the magnitude of the F0 contrast across syllables in individual words; these are then aggregated, demonstrating that speakers’ use of F0 to convey S2 prominence is statistically as well as perceptually significant.Quantifying the manipulation of F0 as an acoustic correlate of stress in Rebkong Amdo Tibetan Rebkong Amdo is a non-tonal variety of Tibetan spoken in Rebkong County, Qinghai Province, PRC. Speakers draw on varied acoustic resources to convey stress in disyllabic words, which are highly frequent in the language. Non-verbs (nouns, adjectives, and numerals) are stressed on the second syllable (S2); the primary acoustic correlate of stress is F0. Verbs are stressed on the first syllable (S1); stress is conveyed by both intensity and F0. For non-verbs, speakers manipulate F0 in different ways to convey S2 prominence. The pitch contour may (a) be flat in both syllables but higher in S2; (b) be flat or slope gently in S1 but fall sharply in S2; or (c) be generally flat in S1 but define a prominent arcing curve in S2. These three patterns, which occur in free variation, require different analytical approaches in order to quantify relative acoustic prominence across syllables: (a) mean F0 (Hz) is measured for eac...

Earlier or Higher? Comparing French rising-falling contour with rising contour in a corpus of conversation

In French intonation, a rising-falling contour (RF) has been described by many authors, but the characteristics of its phonetic realization as well at its phonological status remain controversial. Is its f0 movement temporally aligned earlier compared to the f0 movement of the simple rise (R)? Or is it scaled higher in the speaker’s pitch range? Does it convey conviction and obviousness while the simple rise rather announces that the speaker has more to say? Firstly, the present study compared the phonetic implementation of RF and R in a corpus of naturally occurring conversation. Through the application of a wavelet-based functional mixed model, we could detect significant differences between the shapes of the f0 curves corresponding to RF and R contours. Results show that RF and R mainly differ with respect to the timing of the rise and the amplitude of the falling part. They thus support the claim that these characteristics are more important than the scaling of the pitch peak for the implementation of the contrast between RF and R. Secondly, the results of a forced choice identification task performed by naïve listeners show that they consistently associate the RF contour with the expression of conviction and obviousness and the R contour with the indication that the speaker has more to say.

VOICE2TUBA: transforming singing voice into a musical instrument

In this paper, a scheme to synthesize and convert singing voice into tuba sound is presented. First, our method estimates the fundamental frequency (F0) and the aperiodicity of a monophonic audio signal, in order to obtain the pitch and volume variations of human voice. Then, the parameters extracted are used to generate a musical excerpt emulating a certain musical instrument (tuba) in such a way that the melody resembles the original sung song. To this end, two different generation approaches are devised. One of them is based on additive signal synthesis from harmonic amplitudes. The other one converts the F0 curve into a MIDI stream, in order to allow the play back with a virtual tuba.

Rhapsodie : un Treebank annoté pour l’étude de l’interface syntaxe-prosodie en français parlé

We here describe the Rhapsodie resource, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French, composed of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and 33000 words), and an orthographic transcription. The transcription and the annotations are all aligned on the speech signal : phonemes, syllables, words, speakers, overlaps. The main objective of the Rhapsodie project is to define rich, explicit, and reproducible schemes for the annotation of prosody and syntax in different genres (± spontaneous, ± planned, face-to-face interviews vs. broadcast, etc.), in order to study the prosody/syntax/discourse interface in spoken French, and their roles in the segmentation of speech into discourse units. This resource is freely available at www.projet-rhapsodie.fr. The sound samples (wav/mp3), the acoustic analysis (original F0 curve manually corrected and automatic stylized F0, pitch format), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt), the prosodic annotations (xml, textgrid), and the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France. The metadata are encoded in the IMDI-CMFI format and can be parsed on line.

Characterizing fundamental frequency in Mandarin: A functional principal component approach utilizing mixed effect models

A model for fundamental frequency (F0, or commonly pitch) employing a functional principal component (FPC) analysis framework is presented. The model is applied to Mandarin Chinese; this Sino-Tibetan language is rich in pitch-related information as the relative pitch curve is specified for most syllables in the lexicon. The approach yields a quantification of the influence carried by each identified component in relation to original tonal content, without formulating any assumptions on the shape of the tonal components. The original five speaker corpus is preprocessed using a locally weighted least squares smoother to produce F0 curves. These smoothed curves are then utilized as input for the computation of FPC scores and their corresponding eigenfunctions. These scores are analyzed in a series of penalized mixed effect models, through which meaningful categorical prototypes are built. The prototypes appear to confirm known tonal characteristics of the language, as well as suggest the presence of a sinusoid tonal component that is previously undocumented.

A dynamic tonal perception model for optimal pitch stylization

Automatic pitch stylization is an important resource for researchers working both on prosody and speech technologies. In order to be useful, the stylized F0 curve should contain the fewest possible number of control points while remaining, at the same time, close to the original curve from a perceptual point of view. Here, a pitch stylization algorithm aimed at finding the optimal balance between the number of employed control points and perceptual equality with respect to the original curve is presented. Rather than being defined by means of statistical closeness to the original F0 curve, the quality of the stylized curve is defined on the basis of a dynamic tonal perception model. The number of control points is optimized on the basis of previous results showing that the stylization can be more radical in those areas of the signal where tone perception is less accurate, i.e. in non-prominent areas. Perceptual tests show that, concerning the perceptual equality of the stylization, this approach performs as well as other reference ones, with the advantage of using a significantly lower number of control points. Although it is based on a theoretical background employing phonological units like syllables, the proposed, phonetic, approach does not require any preliminary segmentation or annotation step. It combines, instead, acoustic parameters related to syllabification and prominence detection into a single model which has been designed to be both integrated, in the sense that it does not introduce any pitfalls in the process, and dynamic, in the sense that it does not include rigid tonal perception thresholds.

Rapid pitch correction in choir singers

Highly and moderately skilled choral singers listened to a perfect fifth reference, with the instruction to complement the fifth such that a major triad resulted. The fifth was suddenly and unexpectedly shifted in pitch, and the singers' task was to shift the fundamental frequency of the sung tone accordingly. The F0 curves during the transitions often showed two phases, an initial quick and large change followed by a slower and smaller change, apparently intended to fine-tune voice F0 to complement the fifth. Anesthetizing the vocal folds of moderately skilled singers tended to delay the reaction. The means of the response times varied in the range 197- 259 ms depending on direction and size of the pitch shifts, as well as on skill and anesthetization.

Alternatives to f0 turning points in American English intonation.

Since the inception of the autosegmental‐metrical approach to intonation (Bruce 1977, Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 1996), the location and scaling of f0 turning points have been used to characterize phonologically distinct f0 contours in various languages, including American English. This approach is undermined, however, by the difficulty listeners experience in perceiving differences in turning point location. Numerous studies have demonstrated either listener insensitivity to changes in turning point location or the capacity for other aspects of contour “shape” to override turning‐point alignment for contour identification (Chen 2003, D’Imperio 2000, Niebuhr 2008). Even labelers with access to visual representations of the f0 encounter similar challenges. By contrast, a family of related measurements using area under the f0 curve to quantify differences in contour shape appear more robust. For example, a measure of the synchronization of the center of gravity of the accentual rise with the boundaries of the accented vowel yields 93.9% correct classification in a logistic regression model on a data set of 115 labeled utterances differing in pitch accent type. (L*+H L+H* in ToBI terminology). This classification proceeds entirely without explicit reference to the turning points (i.e., beginning of rise, peak) traditionally used to characterize this distinction.

Você está pedindo ou perguntando? Uma análise entonacional de pedidos e perguntas no português do Brasil

In this paper the intonation contours of yes/no questions and requestsin Brazilian Portuguese are compared. Speech synthesis was used toevaluate the relevance of the F0 configuration of nuclear andprenuclear pitch accents in the distinction between these twointonational patterns. Thirty-one resynthesized melodic versions ofthe sentence “Na festa destranca?” (At the party do you unlock it?/At the party would you please unlock it?) – which is ambiguous inPortuguese in its interpretation as a question or as a request – havebeen created. These versions, placed in four auditory tests, havebeen judged by twenty listeners who evaluated the effects of themodifications in the original sentence, in favor of its interpretationeither as a question or as a request. The results of the perceptiontests show that the opposition between the two melodic contours isdue to the direction of the F0 curve in the nuclear pitch accent,rising in the yes/no question and falling in the request. A phonologicalrepresentation of these patterns, based on distinct temporal alignmentsof the F0 peak in the final stressed syllables, is proposed.

Comparing methods for measuring pitch ‘‘elbows.’’

Currently, there is no standard method for determining the location where an F0 curve begins its upward or downward trajectory (sometimes referred to as the pitch ‘‘elbow’’). It is generally accepted that elbows are hard to measure in a consistent way: some studies have used least‐squares fitting methods, others have relied on visual judgments. This study uses a variety of data from English and Greek that exhibit different degrees of difficulty for locating the elbow. Automated results are derived from various implementations of two algorithms. The first algorithm uses linear least‐squares fitting, where the intersection of two lines that best approximate the pitch contour denotes the point of the elbow. The second algorithm analyzes point‐by‐point changes. The results are then compared with those of human labelers. We present results from a series of statistical tests that estimate the robustness of variations on these two algorithms with respect to the performance of the human labelers. Our aim is to provide a method for measuring elbows that is robust and easy to implement and that can be used with different types of pitch contours, in order to improve accuracy of measurements. a)Also at Univeristy of California, Berkeley.

The role of Swedish tonal word accents in children with language impairment

The present study was designed to examine the production of the Swedish tonal accents in children with language impairment and normal controls in order to verify previous findings. The productions of 25 children with linguistic impairment and their matched controls, aged 4;4–10;0 (mean age 5;11) were evaluated by ratings of fundamental frequency patterns, and by perceptual analysis by ten linguistically naive listeners to assess the distinctiveness of the accents. These methods give a more detailed description of the children's productions of tonal word accents. The results show that 60.8% of the children with language impairment have difficulties to produce the contrast of tonal word accents according to the F0 patterns. The difference in the rating of the F0 curves between the children with LI and their matched controls was significant. There is a significant positive correlation between the perceptual results and the F0‐rating, indicating that the better a child was perceived, the better his/her F0 production was rated. We conclude that the distinction between the tonal word accents is a difficult feature to acquire for Swedish children, which is shown both by acoustic and perceptual evaluations.

Discourse-level contours in Nehiyawewin

This study describes declination and discourse-sized intonation contours in Nehiyawewin, an Algonquian language whose pitch and intonation systems have not been previously studied. The study draws on 270 min of recordings of two female Nehiyaw elders telling their life stories to another Nehiyawewin native speaker. Data is analyzed by using Praat’s default algorithm to generate f0 curves for each breath group. Preliminary results indicate: (1) When breath-group internal pitch peaks are considered, an obvious downward trend of f0 occurred in fewer than half the breath groups analyzed (about 40% or 37/90). This raises questions about the role of classical declination in natural discourse [Umeda, Journal of Phonetics 10 (1982)]. (2) When we abstract away from declination within a breath group by computing mean f0 and mean pitch peak for each breath group and tracking trends for these means, larger patterns seem to emerge; breath groups can be grouped into larger units based on raising and lowering trends. These units have a mean peak range of 150 Hz with a 30 Hz change from one breath group to the next and correspond to a domain of around five clauses (about 3–4 breath groups, about 45 syllables).