Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Pitch analysis tools are used widely in order to measure and to visualize the melodic \naspects of speech. The resulting pitch contours can serve various research interests \nlinked with speech prosody, such as intonational phonology, interaction in \nconversation, emotion analysis, language learning and singing. Due to physiological \ndifferences and individual habits, speakers tend to differ in their typical pitch ranges. \nAs a consequence, pitch analysis results are not always easy to interpret and to \ncompare among speakers. \nIn this study, we use the Praat program (Boersma & Weenink 2015) for analyzing \npitch in samples of conversational Finnish speech and we use the R statistical \nprogramming environment (R Core Team, 2014) for further analysis and \nvisualization. We first describe the general shapes of the speaker-specific pitch \ndistributions and see whether and how the distributions vary between individuals. A \nbootstrapping method is applied to discover the minimal amount of speech that is \nnecessary in order to reliably determine the pitch mean, median and mode for an \nindividual speaker. The scripts and code written for the Praat program and for the R \nstatistical programming environment are made available under an open license for \nexperimenting with other speech samples. The datasets produced with the Praat script \nwill also be made available for further studies.
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2341226933