Sinking feeling.

Abstract

As the pound's value plunges, more nurses want to leave the UK, and fewer want to arrive.

This paper presents preliminary findings of a largescalesystematic comparison of various measuresof pitch range for female speakers of SouthernStandard British English (SSBE) and NorthernStandard German (NSG). The purpose of the studyas a whole is to develop the methodology to allowcomparisons of pitch range across languages andregional accents, and to determine how theycorrelate with listeners' perceptual sensitivity tocross-language/accent differences.In this paper we report on how four measures ofpitch range in read speech (text, sentences)compare across the two groups of female speakers.Preliminary results show that the measures of thedifference between the 90th and 10th percentile (insemitones), and +/- 2 standard deviations aroundthe mean in ST differentiate the groups of speakersin the direction predicted by the stereotypicalbeliefs described in the literature about Germanand English speakers. Furthermore, thesedifferences are most obvious in the read text andlonger sentences and the effect disappears insentences of a short duration.