In between these two, it is possible to identify styles that are defined in relation to the content and function of the spoken content, such as news broadcasts, sports narration, theatrical speech and many others. Research on speaking styles revolves around the task of describing or characterizing the many landmarks in a continuum that goes from what can be called spontaneous speech to speech read from previously prepared texts in laboratory conditions. The first is the study of the effects of speaking style on f 0 and the second is the statistical description and modeling of f 0 distributions. In this article we deal with two lines of research that do not cross paths regularly, at least not as we investigate them here. Important effects of speaking style on f 0 seen in female speakers can be reproduced by combinations of the Burr distributions’ parameters. Results show that two of the parameters that determine its shape correlate well with the empirical f 0 distribution values of SD and skewness. The asymmetric Burr type XII distribution emerges as the one that best fits the data in the corpus. A distribution fitting procedure tested six distributions. Results confirm previous observations that most f 0 distributions have positive skewness, are left-tailed and have kurtosis values that deviate significantly from the normal because of large deviations from the central or modal value.
The second goal of the study is to characterize the statistical properties of f 0 distributions beyond mean and SD. Findings in the previous literature indicate the reverse pattern, though, for languages other than BP. Spontaneous style has statistically significant higher mean, SD and skewness than read speech. Considering only unimodal distributions, results show that there are no statistically significant effects in the male data for any of the four variability estimators. Analysis of their time-normalized contours suggests this is caused by the time-compressed realization of fast transitions from low to high or high to low tones aligned with stressed syllables. Most f 0 contours of word reading are bimodal. The first is to describe the effects of three speaking styles (spontaneous interview, sentence reading and word list reading) on statistical estimators of fundamental frequency ( f 0) variability (mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis) in five female and five male speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP).
0 kommentar(er)
