On the correlation between energy and pitch accent in read English speech

In this paper, we describe a set of experiments that examine the correlation between energy and pitch accent. We tested the discriminative power of the energy component of frequency subbands with a variety of frequencies and bandwidths on read speech spoken by four native speakers of Standard American English, using an analysis by classification approach. We found that the frequency region most robust to speaker differences is between 2 and 20 bark. Across all speakers, using only energy features we were able to predict pitch accent in read speech with accuracy of 81.9%.

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