LAB 12: Prosody 2: Measurement and Interpretation of Fundamental Frequency Contours

Labs: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

The main purpose of this laboratory is to illustrate some of the kinds of problems that investigators run into when they try to measure the acoustic parameters of a speech signal.

Here are the resources that you will need:

Lab Handout (PDF)

Utterances

You will use the recorded utterances from Lab 1. In this lab, you will use the utterances from that database to measure the acoustic parameters of speech. (See handout for details.)

If you have not recorded an utterance database in Lab 1, you can download example recordings of the utterances needed for this lab.

The Tools

You can use either one of the following two analysis tools:

• xwaves - used for spectrum and waveform analysis (UNIX®/Linux®). If you use this tool, you also have the option of using the transcriber script. This script configures xwaves for the types of tasks done in this lab.
• xkl - used for spectrum and waveform analysis (UNIX®/Linux®)

Reference Readings

Selkirk, E. O. "The phonology and phonetics of English intonation." In Prosody and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984, pp. 252-265. ISBN: 0262690985.