On the effects of speech rate upon parameters of the command-response model for the fundamental frequency contours of speech

A command-response model for the process of F0 contour generation has been presented by Fujisaki and his coworkers. The present paper describes the results of a study on the variabilty and speech rate dependency of the model’s parameters in utterances of a speaker of Japanese. It was found that parameters α and β can be considered to be practically constant at a given speech rate, while Fb may vary slightly from utterance to utterance. Among these three parameters, only α was found to have a small but systematic tendency to increase with the speech rate.