Does a speakers pitch range play a role in question intonation?
A. Probably yes. We don’t think this has been studied previously, but in our experiment, the lower the speaker’s pitch range, the less likely the speaker was to use a final high rising H-H% phrasal accent for Yes/No questions. The correlation between these two measures was 0.69, which is surprisingly high for data from only eight speakers. The relationship was evident both within female and male speaker groups, so we suspect that it is a pitch-related phenomenon rather than a gender difference. To be certain, however, this needs to be verified with a larger group of speakers. Our experiment has confirmed and expanded upon some expectations about question intonation, and has also revealed some unexpected findings. The results are both theoretically interesting and practically useful for improving the question intonation of synthetic speech. Listeners are quite sensitive in hearing when intonational features aren’t quite right.
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