Pitch range of intonation contours in English Czech

Pitch range is believed to code important information that is indispensable for correct decoding of spoken messages. Previous research found differences in pitch variation across languages like English, French, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech and German. In addition, differences in pitch range of foreign-accented and native speech were found in various types of speech material. In the present study a sample of sixteen English and American men and women produced recordings of spoken texts consisting of eight paragraphs taken from Czech news broadcasts. Manually corrected F0 tracks provided a possibility to extract four measures of F0 distributional dispersion in order to map global intonational habits of Anglophone learners of Czech as a foreign language. The extracted values were compared with reference values from earlier studies. The results in all four measures indicate that foreign accented Czech is spoken with a pitch range that is narrower than that of English and often even narrower than that of native Czech. Considering results of similar, albeit smaller, studies done earlier, we would attribute our findings to implicit uncertainty in the use of the foreign language, rather than to overcompensation.

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