Differences of pitch profiles in Germanic and slavic languages

This study investigates cross-language differences in pitch range and variation in four languages from two language groups: English and German (Germanic) and Bulgarian and Polish (Slavic). The analysis is based on large multi-speaker corpora (48 speakers for Polish, 60 for each of the other three languages). Linear mixed models were computed that include various distributional measures of pitch level, span and variation, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. A classification experiment based on the relevant parameter measures (span, kurtosis and skewness values for pitch distributions for each speaker) succeeded in separating the language groups.