Time-Integrated Curvature of Fundamental Frequency as a Novel Approach to Pitch Complexity: Insights From...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Speech Science
• Acoustic Phonetics

Background:

• Traditional methods for measuring fundamental frequency (F0) variability often lack temporal detail or are difficult to interpret.
• Existing metrics like range and coefficient of variation may not fully capture dynamic pitch changes in speech.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate a novel method for computing F0 variability using time-integrated curvature.
• To compare this new method with traditional measures (range, coefficient of variation) in adults and children.

Main Methods:

• Time-integrated curvature of F0 was calculated using the squared and normalized second derivative of F0.
• Linear mixed-effects models were employed to assess the impact of age group on F0 variability measures.
• A corpus of adult and child speech was analyzed.

Main Results:

• Both time-integrated curvature and coefficient of variation showed significant effects of age group.
• The coefficient of variation distinguished adults from children broadly, while time-integrated curvature revealed similarities between adjacent age groups.
• Findings align with previous research on developing pitch contour complexity.

Conclusions:

• The novel time-integrated curvature method provides valuable insights into first-language pitch development.
• This approach is applicable to analyzing time-dependent F0 variations in fields like speech pathology and forensic voice comparison.