The Relative Cueing Power of F0 and Duration in German Prominence Perception

Abstract

Previous studies showed for German and other (West) Germanic language, including English, that perceived syllable prominence is primarily controlled by changes in duration and F0, with the latter cue being more powerful than the former. Our study is an initial approach to develop this prominence hierarchy further by putting numbers on the interplay of duration and F0. German listeners indirectly judged through lexical identification the relative prominence levels of two neighboring syllables. Results show that an increase in F0 of between 0.49 and 0.76 st is required to outweigh the prominence effect of a 30% increase in duration of a neighboring syllable. These numbers are fairly stable across a large range of absolute F0 and duration levels and hence useful in speech technology.

Eliciting extra prominence in read-speech tasks: The effects of different text-highlighting methods on acoustic cues to perceived prominence

“…Bold face was almost as effective as italics and yellow highlighting for increasing a target word's duration, but performed less well in increasing the target word's F0 parameters, which are the most powerful acoustic cues to perceived prominence [18][19][20]. Therefore, bold face is put behind the yellow background in our ranking.…”

“…In all other parameters, capitalization proved to be just as ineffective for eliciting increased prosodic prominence as underlining. Yet, given that duration is the second most powerful cue to prominence in German [20], we placed upper-case highlighting before underlining in our ranking.…”

“…The following ProsodyPro measurements were selected and further processed for this study: pitch level (recalculated as semitones [st] in relation to the speaker's average F0); pitch range (in st); intensity level (normalized against the average dB level of the entire text), and duration (in seconds). These parameters were chosen because they all correlate strongly with perceived prominence in German and other Western Germanic languages [18,19,20]. The correlations are positive, i.e.…”

Effects of F0 Acoustic Parameters on the Perception of Serbian Lexical Pitch Accents

“…4 Previous research on F0 peak increase or decrease did not precisely indicate the 'value' that should be used so that listeners could detect any difference in the signals (cf. Kohler 2008;Niebuhr/Winkler, 2017). Since the listeners had never been exposed to the language they listened to, and the stimuli were given as full sentences, the cognitive load was rather high.…”

Comparison of spectral tilt measures for sentence prominence in speech—Effects of dimensionality and adverse noise conditions

“…The relation between prominent units and F0 seems to be more complex, as simply the magnitude of F0 change or distance of F0 maxima to the baseline do not seem to sufficiently describe this relationship (Terken, 1991; see also Gussenhoven, Repp, Rietveld, Rump, & Terken, 1997;Rietveld & Gussenhoven, 1985). Moreover, there seems to be a competition between duration and F0 in conveying the impression of prominence to the listener (see, e.g., Niebuhr & Winkler, 2017). Nonetheless, there is strong correlational evidence of the importance of F0 in conveying prominence in speech (see, e.g., Kohler, 2008).…”