Abstract This article presents an analysis of prosodic smothering in Makonde (Bantu). Prosodic is a phenomenon where certain elements require nearby to be phrased together with them that would otherwise apart. Prior analyses this must lexically specify as triggers smothering. article, building on previous work, derives effects from particular approach the syntax–prosody mapping, according which...

In this paper, we adopt a difference approach to prosody prediction for emotional text-to-speech synthesis, where the prosodic variations between emotional and neutral speech are decomposed into the global and local prosodic variations and predicted using a two-stage model. The global prosodic variations are modeled by the means and standard deviations of the prosodic parameters, while the loca...

This paper tries to discuss the interrelation between prosody and syntax by clarifying some syntactic constraints in Chinese prosodic segmentation and grouping. The main attention will be paid to search for (1) possible correlation between prosodic breaks and syntactic construction; (2) possible correlation between prosodic breaks and POS; and (3) the role of syntactic and lexical information i...

The problem of F0 contour generation in Chinese are addressed in this paper. An F0 contour model based on templates of prosodic words is proposed. Taking templates of prosodic word F0 contour as the basic units, the basic structure of the model is established with references to the “small ripples on top of big waves theory” and “Fujisaki model”. A three-layer prosodic hierarchy which consists o...

The relation between prosodic constituents of different levels (the prosodic hierarchy) and the realization of phonemes is investigated in French and German broadcast speech. Four levels of prosodic categories are defined and the boundaries are automatically derived using syntactic chunking and forced alignment. We show that the higher a vowel position within the prosodic structure, the more st...

A perception experiment was carried out to determine the perceived prosodic boundary strength and the hierarchies of the perceived prosodic boundaries for spontaneous Chinese. The results indicate that perceived prosodic boundaries are highly correlated between intelligible and unintelligible (delexical) utterances, showing that the listeners may judge prosodic boundaries with no reference to s...