2007/03/28

Henton, C. (1995). Pitch dynamism in female and male speech. Language and Communication, 15(1), 43–61.

Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Elisa

The paper aims to investigate pitch dynamism in male and female speech. Two research questions were asked. First, are there any differences between males and females in their use of pitch dynamism? Secondly, are there any inter-language differences in the use of pitch dynamism? The experimenter recruited five males and five females who were English and French bilinguals and shared homogeneous backgrounds. All the subjects were asked to read four paragraphs: two in English and two in French. The calculation of pitch dynamism was done by Visipitch pitch meter. The results did not show any significant differences across genders and languages. Therefore, it was concluded in the paper that there was no inter-sex or inter-language differences in pitch dynamism. It provided a supply to incorporation in ASR and speech synthesis in two ways. For speech synthesis, female and male in pitch dynamism were identical. For ASR, the recognition scheme is not needed for F0 dynamism.