Automatic transcription of prosody is necessary for spoken language understanding. Prominence and intonational boundaries are routinely used to convey meaning beyond that expressed in the lexical content of speech. Using a classiÞcation rule learning algorithm and computationally light acoustic and syntactic features, detection of pitch accent at 87% on spontaneous elicited speech were attained...

The goal of this study is to explore the position of pitch accent commands relative to the accented syllable in final and non-final words for absolute interrogative sentences in Spanish. Fundamental frequency parameters are obtained from the Fujisaki model. Results indicate that accent commands for three-syllable words in final position are associated with late peaks no matter which the stresse...

This paper proposes a framework of F0 contour generation and segmental duration modeling for application in a unit-selection speech synthesis system for Polish – BOSS. We describe the design of the F0 and duration modeling modules and emphasize the role of prosodic features (related to stress, pitch accent and phrase) in these two tasks.

We describe a statistical method for assignment of prosodic phrases and semantic accents in read speech data. The method is based on statistical evaluation of listening test data by a maximum-likelihood approach with parameters estimated by an EM algorithm. We also present linguistically relevant quantitative results about the prosodic phrase and semantic accent distribution in 250 Czech

This paper examines the manifestation of downstep and intonation in the Tokyo and Kochi dialects of Japanese by using three types of syntactically balanced material adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentence modifiers. The main conclusion is that Kochi speakers produce a smaller Major Phrase consisting of fewer lexical accents than in the Tokyo dialect, the Major Phrase being defined as...

This paper describes the results of a joint study on the applicability of the command-response model to F0 contours of European Portuguese, with an aim to use it in a TTS system. Analysis-by-Synthesis of observed F0 contours of a number of utterances by five native speakers indicated that the model with provisions for both positive and negative accent commands applies quite well to all the utte...

Prosody impacts the pronunciation variation of lexical items in a number of ways. Accented syllables tend to be pronounced with their canonical (dictionary) vowel. Deaccented vowels are more likely to be reduced. Coarticulatory influences rarely span intonational phrase boundaries. In this work, we investigate the use of automatically generated prosodic hypotheses to improve a weighted dictiona...

Lexical pitch accent languages such as Swedish and Japanese have been claimed to exhibit variation in phonological inventory and/or phonetic manifestation of pitch accents. This paper reports variations in the phonetic manifestation as well as phonological patterning of the lexical H*+L pitch accent in two Ryukyuan dialects – Shuri and Nakijin. The F0 manifestation of H*+L pitch accent in the t...

The current work is part of a project to characterize the subglottal pressure (Ps) contour associated with a spoken utterance in terms of the distribution of pitch accents and of phrase and boundary tones. It is found that the nuclear pitch accent does not define the start of the termination phase; the utterance offset is a better marker. Declination rate of the working phase and its relation t...

Prosodic structure encodes the grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech in American English through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their in...