Mark Lloyd Miller

Measures of the sentence intonation of read and spontaneous speech in American English

The visual abstraction procedure used in previous studies of declination was tested using 12 subjects who each fit the F0 contours of 19 spoken short simple sentences with baselines. These baselines were found to be poorly replicated the fitters. An objective all-points least-squares best-fit procedure was tested on this corpus and on a set of sentences that had been produced in both spontaneous and read speech by six speakers. The all-points linear regression line was a better descriptor of the F0 contours than either baselines or toplines. Declination did not always occur in these simple declarative sentences; there was more variation present in the F0 contours of sentences that had been uttered during spontaneous speech; 35% of the spontaneous sentences did not show declination; 45% of these sentences better fit the breath-group model. Their F0 contours could be described by a level all-points linear regression line followed by a falling terminal segment.

Reply to Bruno H. Repp

The reader will readily note that much of Repp’s criticism [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 78, 1114–1116 (1985)] reflects his contention that there has been a procedural transgression on the part of the authors and the Society that establishes a ‘‘dangerous precedent.’’ Since Repp provides a partial account we feel that it is first necessary to address this issue.

A perceptually based approach to F0 characterization

While researchers applying quantitative techniques to the characterization of intonation patterns [W. E. Cooper and J. M. Sorensen, Fundamental Frequency in Sentence Production (Springer‐Verlag, Berlin, 1981)] have claimed success in relating phenomena such as F0 “resetting” to the presence of syntactic boundaries [J. Breckenridge and M. Y. Liberman, “The declination effect in perception,” unpublished manuscript, Bell Laboratories (1977)], this procedure has been confined to a highly limited corpus of short, simple‐declarative read sentences. The degree to which these models can be generalized to spontaneous speech has recently become the subject of controversy [N. Umeda, J. Phonet. 10, 279–290 (1982)]. We therefore examined a corpus of spontaneous and read speech with the intent of finding a quantitative characterization which could be applied across speaking conditions. To this end, we analyzed the data using the “topline” modeling procedure, as well as peak, valley, and all‐points rms lines, computed b...

Comparative Visual Displays of Time and Frequency Domain Information in Connected Speech

Despite the well‐known redundancy of speech, certain kinds of acoustic information are uniquely or better seen in either the frequency or time domain. Some of these differences can be clearly seen between different visual displays of digital analyses automatically performed in both domains. In the frequency domain, these include digital spectrograms [Robert Ramey] and spectrum plots [Christopher Cooper and Robert Ramey], and in the time domain, pitch‐synchronous plots Qames Baker], instantaneous‐frequency plots Qanet Baker], and the waveform [Mark Miller] itself. These displays are produced on a Xerox Graphic Printer as hard copy and on a CRT screen for interaction. For example, formants and other acoustic features of steady and quasisteady states, e.g., stressed vowels, are more apparent when studied in the frequency domain. However, often transient events, encompassing only one or several cycles, are seen exclusively in the time domain. Such events, readily seen in the speech waveform, occur at certain ...