Pitch peak height and focus

The purpose of the present study was to find out how the peak heights of two pitch-accented syllables in one utterance are related to different focus conditions. In a perception experiment, an utterance was presented with various combinations of heights of the first and second pitch peaks. Listeners judged which combination of peak heights best represented one of four focus conditions: neutral focus, double contrastive focus, or single contrastive focus on either the first or second pitch accent. The results showed that the majority of the pitch contours was classified unanimously as signalling only one possible focus condition while only few contours were ambiguous with respect to focus. This knowledge can be used to improve speech synthesis and the automatic interpretation of spoken messages.