Prosody carries a lot of information relevant for our understanding of spoken messages. In addition, prosody plays an important role in signalling attitudes and emotions. Prosodic features also constitute an important resource that participants use to achieve mutual understanding in interaction. The aim of this study was to point to possible recurring patterns in the prosodic structure of langu...

This paper proposes an HMM-based approach to generating emotional intonation patterns. A set of models were built to represent syllable-length intonation units. In a classification framework, the models were able to detect a sequence of intonation units from raw fundamental frequency values. Using the models in a generative framework, we were able to synthesize smooth and natural sounding pitch...

Research on the suprasegmental system of Quechua has largely focused on the placement of stress within a word. Previous descriptions of Quechua intonation found in the literature offer a schematic representation of the intonation contour. In order to examine Quechua intonation within the current framework of Autosegmental Metrical (AM) phonology, data from field recordings in Cuzco of Southern ...

This study offers a phonetic description and phonological analysis of a variety of melodic contours in Brazilian Portuguese. These are commonly referred to as conveying the modal, or illocutionary, functions of intonation, as well as some attitudinal uses. The phonological analysis follows the AM framework and aims at distinguishing what is contrastive and what are merely allophonic variations ...

In general, the end of question utterances is accompanied by a rising intonation. However, non-rising intonation is commonly observed in question utterances appearing in conversational speech. In order to clarify the factors involved in the choice of rising or non-rising intonation, in the present work, we analyzed question utterances extracted from Japanese conversational dialogue speech data ...

This chapter provides an introduction to intonation in general, and is loosely based on an oral presentation given in the workshop “Non-native prosody: phonetic description and teaching practice” in Saarbrücken. Although intonation is particularly difficult for learners of a second language to master, it is seldom taught systematically. Although much of the early work on intonation was didactic...

Past studies have indicated that intonation, in the sense of fundamental frequency modulation, can only enhance serial recall to the extent that it can induce a grouping effect, something that can also be induced by a simple insertion of pauses. However, in a study of spoken serial recall of ninedigit lists, we are able to show that recall is significantly better when sequences of digits are ma...

To compensate for the variability in native English intonation and the unpredictability of nonnative speech, we propose a new method of assessing nonnative intonation without any prior knowledge of the target text or phonetics. After recognition of tone events with HMMs and a bigram model of intonation, we define an utterance’s automatic intonation score as the mean of the posterior probabiliti...

There is a tendency across languages to use a rising pitch contour to convey question intonation and a falling pitch contour to convey a statement. In a lexical tone language such as Mandarin Chinese, rising and falling pitch contours are also used to differentiate lexical meaning. How, then, does the multiplexing of the F(0) channel affect the perception of question and statement intonation in...

We describe an implemented system which automatically generates and animates conversations between multiple human-like agents with appropriate and synchronized speech, intonation, facial expressions, and hand gestures. Conversations are created by a dialogue planner that produces the text as well as the intonation of the utterances. The speaker/listener relationship, the text, and the intonatio...