Pitch Accent Types Research Articles

An intonational analysis of disfluency patterns in chronically stuttered speech

While previous stuttering research has successfully revealed areas vulnerable to disfluency at the word level in stuttering, identifying the specific factors responsible for this instability has proved difficult; moreover, inconsistent results are complicated by a failure to control for the effects of phrasal prosody, which govern such word-level factors as lexical stress. The present experiment tested the hypothesis that disfluencies in stuttering are directly proportional to the prominence-level of a given production. Three stuttering subjects participated in an oral sentence-reading task testing a variety of sentence types while manipulating intonational factors such as pitch accent type and location. It was anticipated that pitch-accented syllables, representing a higher degree of stress in an intonation phrase than stressed but non-pitch-accented syllables, would be most prone to triggering disfluency, since they bear a greater level of prominence in the utterance. The results of the study confirmed the major hypothesis: in all of the comparisons between pitch-accented and non-pitch-accented positions of stress, the former attracted the highest rate of disfluent speech productions. This supports the principal hypothesis that intonationally prominent domains, not simply lexically stressed syllables, are a better indicator of unstable positions in stuttered speech.

Effects of pitch accent position, type, and status on focus projection.

This paper examines predictions made by two theories of the relationship between pitch accent and focus. The empirical evidence presented suggests that listeners are sensitive to a variety of factors that may affect the focus projection ability of pitch accents, that is the ability of a pitch accent on one word to mark focus on a larger constituent. The findings suggest that listeners' interpretation of focus structure is most sensitive to the presence or absence of a pitch accent on a focused constituent and the deaccenting of following unfocused material (pitch accent position). Preliminary evidence suggests that the status of a pitch accent as nuclear or prenuclear may also affect listeners' interpretations, though to a lesser extent than accent position. Finally, the results show that focus projection is affected only minimally, if at all, by the type of pitch accent (at least for the two accent types compared (H* vs. L + H*)).

Experiments on the meaning of four types of single-accent intonation patterns in Dutch.

The Grammar of Dutch Intonation (GDI) provides a description of the possible intonation contours of Dutch. The GDI distinguishes accent-lending and nonaccent-lending pitch configurations, but refrains from further functional statements. This paper describes an experimental attempt to verify meaning hypotheses for four Dutch single-accent pitch patterns as postulated in the linguistic literature. The four pitch accent types were realized on proper names; the abstract meanings, in terms of the manipulation of an element of the background shared between speaker and listener, were incorporated in situational contexts, distinguishing between a "default" and a vocative use of the proper name ("orientation"). Listeners ranked the four melodic shapes from most to least appropriate in their specific context. After revision of part of the materials a second perception experiment was conducted, in which subjects had a rank four contexts from most to least appropriate for a specific pitch accent type. Results show a distinct effect of "orientation" on the appropriateness of two of the investigated pitch accent types in the various context types; the other two pitch accent types are associated with the predicted context types (and vice versa) well above chance, indicating the viability of at least two of the linguistic proposals.

A study on natural-sounding Japanese phonetic word synthesis based on the pitch waveform concatenation

A speech output system in which messages are composed by embedding some phonetic words in the prerecorded sentence patterns requires very natural-sounding phonetic words to be embedded. Especially in the case where a very large or an unlimited vocabulary is required, synthesis of very natural-sounding phonetic words would be desired. Therefore, a novel Japanese VCV-concatenation synthesis method based on the pitch waveform concatenation has been studied. The VCV waveforms are extracted from the VCV-balanced spoken word database and pitch waveforms are extracted by means of the excitation synchronous pitch waveform extraction method [Y. Arai et al., ICSLP 96, 1437–1440 (1996)]. The wavelength of each pitch waveform is modified depending on the pitch modification rate, and the global pitch contour of each VCV waveform is modified along with the target pitch pattern, while the micro-prosody and the small perturbation in pitch frequency inherent in that VCV waveform are retained. The auditory tests confirmed the superiority of the novel synthesis method. Finally, the advantage of the spoken word database, which consists of Japanese VCV-balanced word sets uttered forcibly by two pitch accent types (so-called type −0 and type +1 in Japanese) differently from the normal pitch accent, is discussed.

Timing differences between prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents in Italian

In Italian, as in English, lexically stressed syllables can receive a pitch accent, with the last accented syllable being the most prominent (i.e., ‘‘sentence stress’’). Recent analyses based on data from northern Italian varieties describe the nuclear accent of the neutral declarative contour as falling onto the stressed syllable (H+L*), while the prenuclear one, presenting a comparatively later peak, is described as qualitatively different from the other (H*). This analysis is problematic since there is no meaning contrast between H* and H+L*. An alternative analysis of the timing differences models the shape of both accents as H*, where the high in the nuclear one is retracted due to an upcoming low tone associated with the remaining of the utterance (tonal repulsion hypothesis). A similar account has been proposed for English H* by Silverman and Pierrehumbert. This analysis predicts that the timing differences will depend on such things as the number of following stressed syllables for the L-, and also that other pitch accent types (such as the L*+H of the question) will show comparable differences. The analysis was tested by measuring the location of the fundamental frequency peak relative to the beginning of the stressed vowel in various prosodic contexts.