Parameterization of F0 register and discontinuity to predict prosodic boundary strength in Hungarian spontaneous speech

Authors: Uwe D. Reichel, Katalin Mády

Abstract:

This study addresses the questions how to parameterize (1) aspects of fundamental frequency (F0) register, i.e. time-varying F0 level and range within prosodic phrases and (2) F0 discontinuities at prosodic boundaries in order to pre- dict perceived prosodic boundary strength in Hungarian spontaneous speech. For F0 register stylization we propose a new fitting procedure for base-, mid-, and toplines that does not require error-prone local peak and valley detection and is ro- bust against disturbing influences of high pitch accents and boundary tones. From these linear stylizations we extracted features which reflect F0 boundary disconti- nuities and fitted stepwise linear regression and regression tree models to predict perceived boundary strength. In a ten-fold cross-validation the mean correlation between predictions and human judgments amounts up to 0.8.