In European Portuguese (EP), intonation has a grammatical function. In the available research in EP intonation, production imperatives are said to have an F0 risingfalling contour of large amplitude and are described as having an intonation contour similar to wh-questions, although they present rhythmic differences (Viana, 1987). A possible increase in pitch span was also reported. Two percepti...

This paper describes an experiment in which listeners had to evaluate the amount of perceptual difference between pitch contours derived from the same intonation pattern. The melodical difference was felt to be largest if the contours differed in overall shape, irrespective of additional differences in the size of the pitch movements. On the speakers' side, the choice between different contour ...

This paper reports 3 perception experiments on intonation groups and the role of phrasal intonation in the organization of speech prosody. The goal is to help unlimited TTS achieve better naturalness. Experiments were also designed to compliment previous extensive analyses of speech data. Using the PRAAT software and removing segmental information humming experiments of extracted intonation gro...

Sentences in Dutch can be interrupted in various ways. We will use the term intercalation for interruptions by the speaker/writer that occur within the boundaries of a sentence without influencing this sentence (cf. de Groot 1949). The sentence (the host sentence or host) continues after the intercalation as if the intercalation were not there; the syntactic structure and the intonation pattern...

In order to bring the tools of statistical pattern recognition to bear on intonation modelling, we need tailor-made corpora in the languages of interest. We describe how two such corpora were developed (for isiZulu and isiXhosa, respectively). We also show how those corpora can be used without further interpretation to gain insight into matters such as overall pitch contours and gender differen...

An acoustic analysis of a German dialogue corpus showed that the sound qualities and durations of fricatives, vocoids, and diphthongs at the ends of question and statement utterances varied systematically with the utterance-final intonation segments, which were high-rising in the questions and terminal-falling in the statements. The ways in which the variations relate to phenomena like sibilant...

Recently it has been proposed to base intonational typology on the way languages convey focus (pragmatic prominence). Generally, languages can enhance, add or delete phrase boundary tones (phrase languages) or add an extra pitch accent (intonation languages) to mark focus. Tone languages are somewhat problematic for this typology as it is difficult to make direct observations on their sentence ...

An accurate control of fundamental frequency is one of the essential demands in professional singing. This control relies on auditory and kinesthetic feedback. However, a loud accompaniment may mask the auditory feedback, leaving the singers to rely on kinesthetic feedback. The object of the present study was to estimate the significance of auditory and kinesthetic feedback to pitch control in ...

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological models. The first phase is an exploration of th...

The significance of auditory and kinesthetic feedback to pitch control in singing was described in a previous report of this project for students at the beginning of their professional solo singer education.(1) As it seems reasonable to assume that pitch control can be improved by training, the same students were reinvestigated after 3 years of professional singing education. As in the previous...