A Study of Two English Nuclear Tones

This paper outlines a framework for the description of English intonation, and then reports on a study of “high falling” and “low rising” nuclear tones, based on measurements on a corpus of 150 utterances produced by three speakers. It is found (i) that under the conditions of the experiment, the various tokens of a given intonation type as produced by a given talker cluster closely around a single pattern; and (ii) that speakers differ one from another in consistent ways, suggesting that adequate normalisation procedures can be found. Synthetic speech approximations to the patterns are discussed.