This paper describes the declination trends of f0 in conversational speech data. A 10-minute dialogue interaction from a corpus of spontaneous speech was annotated to identify intersilence units (ISU) and turns. Detailed annotation of the ISUs was conducted in terms of communicative types and pitch patterns. f0 declination was measured by (1) fitting a regression line to f0 trajectories and (2)...

Glottal volume velocity waveform characteristics of 224 subjects, categorized in four groups according to gender and vocal training, were determined, and their relations to sound-pressure level, fundamental frequency, intra-oral pressure, and age were analyzed. Subjects phonated at three intensity conditions. The glottal volume velocity waveforms were obtained by inverse filtering the oral flow...

Chinese is a tone language. As a tone language, each lexical item has an inherent tone pattern. In Chinese there are four tones : high, rising, low and falling. Our experiment investigates first the pattern of declination in Standard Chinese broadcasts and TV news speech, secondly the interaction of this effect with the sentence lenght and finally the evolution of the tones F0 values all throug...

In two experiments involving a total of 83 participants, the effect of a vertical angular optical compression on the perceived distance and size of a target on the ground was investigated. Replicating an earlier report (Wallach & O’Leary, 1982), reducing the apparent angular declination below the horizon produced apparent object width increases (by 33%) consistent with the perception of a great...

Japanese dialects spoken in the Kinki and Shikoku regions have a lexical contrast of pitch register types called shiki. The shallow f0 downtrend in the high-pitched shiki type is thought of as a manifestation of backdrop f0 declination that is blind to tonal structure. Acoustic analysis of three Japanese dialects with 2or 3-way contrast of shiki types, however, reveals that the degree of f0 dec...

The visual abstraction procedure used in previous studies of declination was tested using 12 subjects who each fit the F0 contours of 19 spoken short simple sentences with baselines. These baselines were found to be poorly replicated the fitters. An objective all-points least-squares best-fit procedure was tested on this corpus and on a set of sentences that had been produced in both spontaneou...

As South Connaught Irish typically uses the same (falling) tune type in both questions and declaratives, this paper examines whether sentence mode might be differentiated in this dialect by other aspects of the contour realization, namely declination slope, peak height and pitch level. A set of matched declaratives (DEC), whquestions (WHQ) and yes/no questions (YNQ) of two phrase lengths (with ...

Laryngeal aerodynamic and acoustic characteristics of African American voice production were examined from vowel samples produced by ten adult female and ten adult male speakers. The data were compared with that for a control group consisting of ten adult female and ten adult male White speakers, matched for age, height, and weight. All measures were analyzed using Cspeech 4.0. Aerodynamic meas...