It has been widely demonstrated that a word is pronounced with lower phonetic redundancy when it has higher contextual predictability. This probability-oriented reduction is known as “probabilistic reduction.” This phenomenon can neatly be captured by Message-Oriented Phonology (MOP) [5]. MOP hypothesizes that a speaker balances the efficiency and accuracy of message transmission. When a word is contextually predictable, it can be conveyed successfully to an addressee, the result of which is that the speaker improves the efficiency of the message transmission. On the other hand, when a word is less predictable, the message transmission is more likely to fail, and thus a speaker needs to invest more resource cost in a speech signal, with the result that the phonetic redundancy is increased. This study aims to explore whether probabilistic reduction can be extended to pitch values. Most previous literature discusses probabilistic reduction in relation to word duration, so therefore, to the best of my knowledge, this study is the first study to investigate the relationship between pitch values and contextual predictability of a word. It will be demonstrated that a word is pronounced with a higher pitch value, when it is contextually less predictable. This result is amenable to MOP.
Cite as: Hashimoto, D. (2020) Pitch peak and word predictability: Results from CSJ corpus. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 444-448, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-91
@inproceedings{hashimoto20_speechprosody,
author={Daiki Hashimoto},
title={{Pitch peak and word predictability: Results from CSJ corpus}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={444--448},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-91}
}