Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding October 22-24, 2001 Molly Pitcher Inn, Red Bank, NJ, USA

Eliminating Downstep in Prosodic Labeling of American English

Audra Dainora

Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

I remove downstep from the phonological inventory of English based on careful statistical study. In my data I find no distinction between tones labeled downstepped and tones labeled nondownstepped. If tones considered downstepped are indeed in a compressed pitch range relative to the preceding tone, then they should have a target drop in frequency that is different from the target for nondownstepped tones. Instead I find that the frequency drops obey a normal distribution that shows no evidence of bimodality. The values of the frequency drops for downstepped and nondownstepped tones form the right- and left-hand tails of this distribution.

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Bibliographic reference.  Dainora, Audra (2001): "Eliminating downstep in prosodic labeling of American English", In Prosody-2001, paper 7.