A metric for the height of certain pitch peaks in English

Subjects were asked to produce various utterances with a systematic variation of pitch range (thought of as “degree of overall emphasis”). These utterances each contained two main pitch accents; each utterance was considered as a possible answer to one of two different questions which effectively “foregrounded” either the first or the second pitch accent. We investigated the scaling of peak and valley F0 measurements as pitch range varied. Our conclusions: (1) for intonations of this type, there is a fixed, declining baseline independent of pitch range; (2) the equation, (FP − FB)/FB = k × (BP − BB)/BB, fits our data quite well, where FP is “foreground peak,” FB is the “baseline value at the location of the foreground peak,” BP is “background peak,” and BB is “baseline value at the location of the background peak.” That is, the ratio of foreground peak to background peak is constant when they are expressed in terms of baseline units above the baseline.