The Grammar of Dutch Intonation (‘GDI’, [1]), the model I adopted to describe intonational phenomena, provides an inventory of accent-lending and boundarymarking pitch configurations for Dutch, but little is known about the factors influencing the choice within these two categories. The present study aims to provide some insight into this issue, by way of experimentally testing abstract linguis...

This paper investigates some of the phonetic characteristics of the High Rising Terminal (HRT), a major intonational innovation now attested in numerous dialects of English worldwide. Based on a corpus containing recordings of different geographical varieties of contemporary English, it presents an inventory of the intonation patterns used to realize the HRT. It also suggests that late rising c...

In the intonation of polar questions in the Northern Russian dialect of Varzuga (Kola Peninsula), two different intonation patterns are frequently used: the Standard Russian H*L pitch accent, with a high rise and immediate fall, but also a “broad hat” pattern, in which the high rise is followed by a late fall, aligned to the first syllable after the last lexical stress. This contour does not fi...

In this contribution we propose a hierarchical intonation model for synthesising f0 contours with application to text-to-speech synthesis in Galician language. This model makes use of the implicit knowledge that resides in a database of natural f0 contours obtained from a read corpus. The novelty of this method lies on the way the f0 contour is generated. First, no phonological description in t...

This preliminary study aimed to apply the command-response model to the analysis of disrupted intonation patterns in speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Three Cantonese PD speakers with mild prosodic impairment participated. The speech stimuli were 36 utterances (questions and statements). Productions were analyzed using the model parameters (base frequency, magnitude and onset time of each...

The influence of emotions on intonation patterns (more specifically F0/pitch contours) is addressed in this article. A number of authors have claimed that specific intonation patterns reflect specific emotions, whereas others have found little evidence supporting this claim and argued that F0/pitch and other vocal aspects are continuously, rather than categorically, affected by emotions and/or ...

This paper describes an initial attempt at the construction of a data-driven model of Swedish intonation. The study is mainly concerned with model building and prediction of the intonation patterns of accented words in a corpus of read news in Swedish. Extraction of pitch information is achieved by performing a stylization of the pitch contours. The information is used to build a model for the ...

Text-to-Prosody systems based on the use of prosodic databases extracted from natural speech will be a key point for further development of new Text-to-Speech systems. This paper describes a system using such speech databases to generate the rhythm and the intonation of texts written in French. The system is based on a very crude chinks ’n chunks prosodic phrasing algorithm and on an automatic ...