Re: musical tones in speech

[Bruno Repp <repp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The interchange between Martin and Alain is most interesting. I have
the feeling that Alain has missed the boat by looking at complete F0
contours, but his comments do raise the following question: Is it
possible that the Dutch intonation researchers, in the process of
extracting F0 targets from the intonation contours, applied
subjective criteria that somehow were affected by the common musical
tones they had been exposed to outside the laboratory? Since F0
target extraction is not automatitized, I presume it involves
repeated listening to utterances and subsequent decision making. Is
it possible that the distributional biases arose at that stage?

--Bruno

Bruno H. Repp
Research Scientist
Haskins Laboratories
270 Crown Street
New Haven, CT 06511-6695
Tel. (203) 865-6163, ext. 236
FAX (203) 865-8963
e-mail: repp@haskins.yale.edu