What happens when f0 movements and prosodic units were randomly aligned

According to intonation phonology, surface f0 is generated from superimposition of local f0 events associated with hierarchical prosodic units (e.g., Pierrehumbert, 1980). This study conducted two experiments to investigate whether or to what extent the misalignment between f0 patterns and prosodic units would result in awkward-sounding English intonation. In Experiment 1, f0 contours of utterances from Obama Weekly Address were extracted via Praat, interpolated and smoothed using a quadratic spine, and superimposed to another Obama-Weekly-Address stretch by PSOLA algorithm. The perception result, surprisingly, showed that the resynthesized sentence still sounded quite natural in intonation, regardless of the random alignment between f0 patterns and the location of stresses and phrases. In Experiment 2, the Obama-Weekly-Address stretches were superimposed with f0 contours of three different languages that differ in the size of basic prosodic domains: Mandarin (a tone language), Korean (an accent phrase la...