A Phonetic Analysis of Speech Intonation in Esfahani Persian
摘要
Intonation, as a key suprasegmental feature of language, plays a crucial role in spoken communication. A clearer understanding of intonation contributes significantly to both speech perception and production. This study applies phonetic and phonological analyses to examine interrogative utterances in two Persian dialects: Esfahani and colloquial Tehrani. Employing the rise-fall-connection (RFC) phonetic model developed by P. A. Taylor (Text-to-Speech Synthesis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009), the analysis is based on 40 speech samples comprising 5 interrogative sentences spoken by 5 native speakers (2 male and 3 female) from each dialect group. Acoustic features were extracted and statistically analyzed using SPSS. The findings indicate that while pitch height and the duration of rising and falling contours are broadly similar across the two dialects, Esfahani Persian exhibits a notably narrower pitch range compared to Tehrani Persian. This suggests a more restricted intonational span in Esfahani speech, reflecting dialect-specific prosodic characteristics.