Analysis of pitch profiles in Germanic and Slavic lan- guages

This study presents the results of a large-scale analysis of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two typologically different language groups: English and German (Germanic) and Bulgarian and Polish (Slavic). The comparison 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 cha racteristic differences across languages and between typological language groups. A classification Multi_Layer Perceptron algorithm based on the relevant parameter measures (span, kurtosis and skewness values for pitch distributions for each speaker) succeeded in separating the typologically different languages with 95% correctness. Significant differences between the language groups were found: German and English speakers use lower pitch maxima, narrower pitch span, and generally less variable pitch than Bulgarian and Polish speakers. Short introduction to multilingual prosody description based on general language aspects is given. Sources of variability of fundamental frequency and their relevance for the extraction and interpretation of paralinguistic information are discussed with relation to multilingual speech prosody processing.