2006 Presentations (Communicative Events)

On the Correlation between Energy and Pitch Accent in Read English Speech

Hirschberg, Julia Bell; Rosenberg, Andrew

In this paper, we describe a set of experiments that examine the correlation between energy and pitch accent. We tested the discriminative power of the energy component of frequency sub- bands with a variety of frequencies and bandwidths on read speech spoken by four native speakers of Standard American English, us- ing an analysis by classification approach. We found that the frequency region most robust to speaker differences is between 2 and 20 bark. Across all speakers, using only energy features we were able to predict pitch accent in read speech with accuracy of 81.9%.