Comparing parameterizations of pitch register and its discontinuities at prosodic boundaries for Hungarian

We examined how well prosodic boundary strength can be captured by two declination stylization methods as well as by four different representations of pitch register. In the stylization proposed by Liebermann et al. (1985) baseand topline are fitted to peaks and valleys of the pitch contour, whereas in Reichel&Mády (2013) these lines are fitted to medians below and above certain pitch percentiles. From each of the stylizations four feature pools were induced representing different aspects of register discontinuity at word boundaries: discontinuities related to the base-, mid-, and topline, as well as to the range between baseand topline. Concerning stylization the medianbased fitting approach turned out to be more robust with respect to declination line crossing errors and yielded base-, topline and range-related discontinuity characteristics with higher correlations to perceived boundary strength. Concerning register representation, for the peak/valley fitting approach the baseand topline patterns showed weaker correspondences to boundary strength than the other feature pools. We furthermore trained generalized linear regression models for boundary strength prediction on each feature pool. It turned out that neither the stylization method nor the register representation had a significant influence on the overall good prediction performance.