Spoken languages have rhythmic structures, often phonologically described in terms of the metrical phrasal stress patterns of that language [1, 2, 3, 4]. Recent studies with English, Japanese, and Spanish suggest that rhythmic phrasal stress patterns are articulated by syllable to syllable jaw displacement variations, with concomitant syllable to syllable changes in vocal tract resonance freque...

Cantonese is a major Chinese dialect with a complicated tone system. This research focuses on quantitative modeling of Cantonese tones. It uses Stem-ML, a language-independent framework for quantitative intonation modeling and generation. A set of F0 prediction models are built, and trained on acoustic data. The prediction error is about 11 Hz or 1 semitone. The resulting optimal model paramete...

The prosodic quality of a text-to-speech system is important for the intellegibility and perceived naturalness of synthetic speech. In earlier works the author developed a linguistically motivated model of German intonation based on the quantitative Fujisaki model of the production process of F0. The current paper compares results yielded by automatic Fujisaki modeling with a GToBI-style anotat...

Vowel devoicing at phrase boundaries is shown to depend on sentence mode (statement, question) and information structure (non-contrastive vs. contrastive and broad vs. narrow focus), which affect the type of nuclear accent and boundary tone. In li-questions, considerably less devoicing of the vowels before the phrase boundary is found than in other conditions, because the rising boundary contou...

The current study examines the interaction of syllable tones and vowel quantity in the production and perception of monosyllabic words of Thai. A speech corpus containing groups of words differing only as to tone type and vowel quantity was designed. These were embedded in a short carrier sentence of five mid tone syllables, with the target word being the center syllable. The utterances were an...

In music performance a basic principle is the marking of phrases, which often seems to be achieved by means of tone durations. In our grammar for music performance the rule PHRASE ARCH, has been formulated to model this eflect. A technical description of the rule is presented. Also presented is an attempt to match the diflerent parameters of this rule to the duration data fiom 28 performances o...

Vowel devoicing at phrase boundaries is shown to depend on sentence mode (statement, question) and information structure (non-contrastive vs. contrastive and broad vs. narrow focus), which affect the type of nuclear accent and boundary tone. In li-questions, considerably less devoicing of the vowels before the phrase boundary is found than in other conditions, because the rising boundary contou...

Cantonese is a major Chinese dialect with a complicated tone system. This research focuses on quantitative modeling of Cantonese tones. It uses Stem-ML, a language-independent framework for quantitative intonation modeling and generation. A set of F0 prediction models are built, and trained on acoustic data. The prediction error is about 11 Hz or 1 semitone. The resulting optimal model paramete...

Recent studies on the analysis of intonational function examine a r a n ~ of materials from cue phrases in monologue (Litman and Hirschberg, 1990) and dialogue (Hirschberg and Litman, 1987; Hockey, 1991) to longer utterances in both monologue and dialogue (McLemore, 1991). Results match specific intonational tunes to certain discourse functions which are more or less well defined. Although thes...