Betrouwbaarheid bij het meten van toonhoogtebereik

The pitch range of an utterance may be characterized in terms of the highest peak of the contour or in terms of trend lines connecting either the peaks or the valleys of the contour ("declination lines"). In a judgment task, the reliability of these characterizations has been investigated. In a set of forty utterances, five trained phoneticians determined both the highest peaks (F0-maxima) and the slopes of the declination lines. For the F0-maximum, agreement between the judges was high with respect to its value but not so high with respect to its exact position in the contour. The F0-maxima determined by the judges also correlated highly with the values of the F0-maxima measured automatically. For the declination lines, agreement between the judges was lower. The judges differed more with respect to the values of beginnings and endings of the lines and with respect to their slopes than with respect to the values of the F0-maxima. These differences could not be attributed to one atypical judge. The F0-maximum, either based on human judgment or automatic measurement, appears to be the most reliable characterization of the pitch range of a prosodic phrase.