This paper explores whether informationand confirmationseeking questions are marked intonationally in Majorcan Catalan by means of three different perception tests (a congruity test, a rating test and a test based on the classical CP paradigm). The results show that a difference in pitch scaling on the leading H tone of the H+L* nuclear pitch accent is the main cue used by Majorcan listeners to...

The report is concerned with the experimental study of the idiosyncrasy of utterance-into-phrase segmentation observed in the speech of a popular Russian TV-anchorman and two TV-news readers. Comparative statistical estimation of relative frequencies of occurrence of pauses of various duration, frequencies of occurrence of phrases and pairs of phrases with a different number of accent units wer...

The current paper examines influences of speech rate on Fujisaki model parameters based on read speech from the BonnTempo-Corpus containing productions by 12 native speakers of German at five different intended tempo levels (very slow, slow, normal, fast, fastest possible). The normal condition was produced at an average rate of 6.34 syllables/s or 100%, the very slow version at 67%, and the fa...

This study investigates two factors related to the falling tune found in wh-questions in Maltese. It examines the alignment, of the H(igh) and L(ow) tone targets found in the early part of this tune in an attempt at providing a more definitive phonological analysis of the tune. Carefully controlled laboratory speech is used in an attempt at quantifying the alignment details. The study also addr...

In Japanese, every content word has its own mora-based H/L pitch pattern when it is uttered in isolation, called accent type. When reading out a written sentence, however, this lexical H/L pattern is often changed according to the context, known as word accent sandhi. In our previous work, an accent sandhi predictor was developed using CRF [1], and in this paper, the predictor is improved throu...

Theories of information structure argue that focus involves alternative sets; experimental studies have also shown that narrowly focused constituents lead to the activation of alternatives. However, narrow focus can be realized with different accent types, indicating the information status of the referent and it is unclear whether it is focus domain or accent type that conditions the activation...

This paper presents the evaluation of a system for speech F0 contour prediction for European Portuguese using the Fujisaki model. It is composed of two command-generating subsystems, the phrase command sub-system and the accent command sub-system. The parameters for evaluating the ability of each sub-system are described. A comparison is made between original and predicted F0 contours. Finally,...

This study examined how four- to five-year-olds and seven- to eight-year-olds used intonation (accent placement and accent type) to encode topic and focus in Dutch. Naturally spoken declarative sentences with either sentence-initial topic and sentence-final focus or sentence-initial focus and sentence-final topic were elicited via a picture-matching game. Results showed that the four- to five-y...

Automatic prosodic marking is very important in speech signal processing, since its results are required in many subsections, e.g. speech synthesis and speech recognition. The most important prosodic features on the linguistic level are the marking of accents and phrases. In this paper, we develop an automatic algorithm for marking accents and phrases which analyzes the F0 contour by using the ...

This paper presents the evaluation of a system for speech F0 contour prediction for European Portuguese using the Fujisaki model. It is composed of two command-generating subsystems, the phrase command sub-system and the accent command sub-system. The parameters for evaluating the ability of each sub-system are described. A comparison is made between original and predicted F0 contours. Finally,...