An Acoustic Analysis of Persian Children’s Story-telling Based on Rise, Fall and Connection Model (RFC)

Abstract

This research article is aimed at investigating the acoustic analysis of intonation in the story-telling of the 5-6-year-old children in Persian and also studying the correlation between gender and intonation. To fulfill this end, we analyzed the distribution of “pitch” and “duration” patterns in 40 interrogative utterances produced by 8 children (4 girls and 4 boys), based on Taylor’s rise, fall and connection model (RFC) (2009). Then the acoustic parameters “pitch” and “duration” were measured, and the data were analyzed statistically using T-test to verify the dependability of the data and the correlation between intonation patterns and gender. The results revealed that, gender parameter did not affect the intonation patterns in children’s story-telling and in spite of some trivial differences in the degrees of “pitch” and “duration”, there was no statistically significant difference between the two genders. However, the average of values of “pitch” and “duration” in the rise part of the intonation pattern was higher among the girls, while, in the fall part of the intonation pattern, the average of values of the two acoustic parameters was higher among the boys.

Keywords

• intonation
• gender
• rise-fall connection model
• peak
• duration
• pitch