F0 and Intensity Distributions of Marsec Speakers: Types of Speaker Prosody

Abstract

Most research on F0 has attempted to model the behaviour of an entire linguistic community (e.g of speakers of US or UK English, French, Japanese etc). In this research, an attempt is made in two analyses to characterize some prosodic aspects of individual differences within the speaker community. For this, the statistical distributions of F0 and intensity parameters were examined. It was found in the first analysis (34 male speakers, nine speech styles) that F0 distributions showed a number of characteristic patterns while intensity distributions did not pattern in any particular fashion. F0 distributions fell into four patterns, suggesting four styles of F0 whatever the speech style is. This classification was confirmed in our second analysis (11 male speakers, one speech task). These various patterns of F0 distributions are discussed with regard to the speech task and to the speaker’s style.