The relationship between the prosodic feature of speech melody (intonation) and fundemantal frequency (F0) of voice is briefly introduced together with an overview of the communicative functions of the phenomenon. The core of the study builts upon a sample of 448 sentences spoken by 28 Czech speakers and the same sentences produced by the text-to-speech synthesis system of ARTIC, which is based on concatenation of variable-size units without a special prosodic module.
The differences in global statistic descriptors between human and synthetic production of fundamental frequency tracks were sought together with information about cummulative slope index (CSI) and the pattern provided by k-means cluster analysis of the sample. Relatively clear differences between statements and question-word questions emerged.