PITCHING IT DIFFERENTLY: A COMPARISON OF THE PITCH RANGES OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH SPEAKERS

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary findings of a largescale \nsystematic comparison of various measures \nof pitch range for female speakers of Southern \nStandard British English (SSBE) and Northern \nStandard German (NSG). The purpose of the study \nas a whole is to develop the methodology to allow \ncomparisons of pitch range across languages and \nregional accents, and to determine how they \ncorrelate with listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to \ncross-language/accent differences. \nIn this paper we report on how four measures of \npitch range in read speech (text, sentences) \ncompare across the two groups of female speakers. \nPreliminary results show that the measures of the \ndifference between the 90th and 10th percentile (in \nsemitones), and +/- 2 standard deviations around \nthe mean in ST differentiate the groups of speakers \nin the direction predicted by the stereotypical \nbeliefs described in the literature about German \nand English speakers. Furthermore, these \ndifferences are most obvious in the read text and \nlonger sentences and the effect disappears in \nsentences of a short duration.

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