Cross-­linguistic analysis of pitch range and its influence on perceived speech friendliness

Intonation is an important cue in evaluating speech of other speakers. Studies have shown how pragmatically meaningful it is (Grabe et al. 2003). Apart from intonational contours that may be interpreted differently depending on the context, pitch range has been named a speech parameter that is especially conducive to judging whether a speaker sounds friendly or unfriendly. Chen, Rietveld and Gussenhoven (2001) compared pitch range in Dutch and English, concluding that the latter is perceived as more friendly than the former due to its larger pitch range. This conclusion has led us to investiga... Mehr ...