The superior effectivenes of the F0 range for identifying the context from sounds without phonemes

This study concerned the relationship between the prosodic feature, especially F0, and the listeners’ identification of contexts. It became obvious that duration and F0 range are the important cues to guess speakers’ emotional state or contexts [1, 2, 3, 4]. However, as the stimuli used were designed to keep F0 average constant, we could not see the effect of big F0 range and high F0 components separately. To clarify this problem, we presented 400 triangle waves (4duration x 10 beginning F0 x 10 ending F0) as stimuli, so that we can analyze by F0 range, F0 average, F0 maximum, and F0 minimum. 20 university students listened to the stimuli and asked if they perceived the sounds as “disagreement,” “hesitation,” or “agreement.” While F0 range made the largest effectiveness to the responses, neither F0 average, F0 maximum nor F0 minimum did not show any influence on identification of contexts.