Measures of the sentence intonation of read and spontaneous speech in American English

Abstract

The visual abstraction procedure used in previous studies of declination was tested using 12 subjects who each fit the F 0 contours of 19 spoken short simple sentences with baselines. These baselines were found to be poorly replicated by 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 spontaneous and read speech by six speakers. The all‐points linear regression line was a better descriptor of the F 0 contours than either baselines or toplines. Declination did not always occur in these simple declarative sentences; there was more variation present in the F 0 contours of sentences that had been uttered during spontaneous speech; 35% of the spontaneous sentences did not show declination; 45% of these sentences better fit the breath‐group model. Their F 0 contours could be described by a level all‐points linear regression line followed by a falling terminal segment.