Evaluation of prosody-related features and word frequency for Malay speeches

Changes in energy and pitch under various speaking conditions may corresponds to speaker intention and information content perceived by the speaker. In this paper, two prosody-related features which are energy and pitch of word utterances are experimented and the relationships with word frequency are investigated. Two parliamentary speeches are segmented manually into sentences and then into individual words in this experiment. Next, the maximum, minimum and mean of pitch and energy are extracted from each word to calculate word energy and pitch measure. The frequency of each word is counted to identify the relationship between word frequency with the pitch and energy measure. The study found that there is a significant relationship between word frequency and energy measure of word utterances in Malay speech but no significant relationship between word frequency and pitch measure.