Focus, Lexical Stress and Boundary Tone: Interaction of Three Prosodic Features

This paper studies how focus, lexical stress and rising boundary tone act on F0 of the last preboundary word. We find that when the word is non focused, the rising boundary tone takes control almost from the beginning of the word and flattens F0 peak of the lexical stress. When the word is focused, the rising boundary tone is only dominant after F0 peak of lexical stress is formed. This peak is even higher than F0 height required by the rising boundary tone at the end of the word. Furthermore, the location of lexical stress restrains the height at F0 peak and high end to be reached. The interaction of these three factors on a single word leads to F0 competition due to limited articulatory dimensions. The study helps to build prosodic model for high quality speech synthesis.