| Status | Proposal [Chapter 6]Grice92,Howard-Jones92a. |
| Goal | Diagnostic and comparative evaluation of parameters used to characterise specific intonation contours (e.g. falling and rising slope), regardless of the context in which they appear. |
| Languages | English and Italian. |
| Items | Meaningful words of varying segmental complexity in terms of phonological vowel length and syllable structure, e.g.\ (1) sketched, rain, moralise, salvageable (English) (2) re, basta, medico, nominano (Italian). Several items are included for each level of complexity, with accurate stress placement. Items are placed in a short, neutral carrier phrase, e.g. The word..., or Dico...Each item should be generated with the contours the system can produce (e.g. those triggered by a period ``.'', question mark ``?'', exclamation mark ``!'', or comma ``,'') in addition to a reference monotone. |
| Procedure | Rating of naturalness by naive subjects using magnitude estimation (see Section 12.3.2). |
| Time | With 3 contours, 4 levels of segmental complexity, 5 items in each level, 4 repetitions of each token and an interstimulus interval of 5 sec, about 30 min per synthesiser. |
| Analysis | Automatic calculation of the geometric mean of the responses per synthesiser, segmental complexity, and contour. |