The aim of this paper is to develop the methodology thatudwould allow us to investigate the nature of variability in pitchudrange across speakers of different languages. In particular, weudwanted to investigate whether by using linguistically basedudpitch range measures, such as those proposed by [1-3], we areudable to characterise differences in pitch range acrossudlanguages. We investigated Southern Standard British Englishud(SSBE) and Northern Standard German (NSG), as it is oftenudassumed that speakers of SSBE have a wider pitch range thanudspeakers of NSG [4]. Using the linguistic measures suggestedudby [3], we found no such differences between NSG and SSBE,udalthough a difference in the predicted direction was found withudanother linguistically based measure. Our study highlights theuddifficulty of using the previously suggested linguisticudmeasures for cross-language comparisons, as some tonaludstructures are not equally distributed across the two languages.udWe therefore suggest that more suitable linguistic measures ofudpitch range may need to take the tonal distribution in theuddifferent languages into account.
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