Title of the article

2.Methods

2.1.Stimuli

A male native speaker of standard Dutch read the sentence Neemt u de trein naar WAgeningen? with a single ‘H*L’ accent on the first syllable of Wageningen. The utterance was recorded onto digital audio tape (DAT) using a Sennheiser MKH 416 unidirectional condenser microphone, transferred to computer disk (16 kHz, 16 bits) and digitally processed using the Praat speech processing software (Boersma & Weenink, 1996; Boersma & van Heuven, 2001). The intonation pattern of the utterance was stylized by hand as a sequence of straight lines in the ERB x linear time representation. Nine intonationally different versions were then generated using the PSOLA analysis-resynthesis technique (e.g. Moulines & Verhelst, 1995; Rietveld & van Heuven, 2001: 379-380) implemented in the Praat software. The nine versions were identical up to and including the ‘H*L’ configuration on Wageningen. From that point onwards the nine versions diverged into two falls and seven rises. The terminal frequencies of the nine versions were chosen to be perceptually equidistant, i.e., the difference between any two adjacent terminal frequencies was equal in terms of the ERB scale._⁹ The terminal pitch of version 1 equaled 80 Hz, the increment in the terminal frequency for each following version was 0,25 ERB. The nine pitch patterns are shown in Figure 3.

F
igure 3. Steps 1 through 9 along resynthesized continuum differing in terminal F0 by 0,25 ERB increments. Intensity contour (dB) and segmentation (by syllables) are indicated.