Foreign accents in second language (L2) production are caused by interference from the phonological system and phonetic realization of the speaker’s first language (L1), including both segmental and prosodic features. This paper examines the intonation structure of Seoul Korean and its realization by American English speakers. Four English speakers of Korean, differing in fluency, and two Korea...

Within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish), our recent work includes two approaches to simulating intonation in regional varieties of Swedish. The first involves a method for modeling intonation using the SWING (SWedish INtonation Generator) tool, where annotated speech samples are resynthesised with rule-based intonation and audio-visually analysed with...

In this work we present a Maximum Likelihood (ML) joint pitch curve modeling, inspired by HMM TTS synthesis concept. This model provides an optimal solution for the coarse target intonation curve (3 points per syllable) and incorporates both static and dynamic pitch values for better utterance intonation modeling. The coarse intonation curve may be optionally combined with the original pitch ex...

Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. We present initial steps of a larger project investigating and describing intonational variation in the Spontal database of 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish, and testing the hypothesis that the concept of a standard question intonation such as a final pi...

Within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish), our recent work includes two approaches to simulating intonation in regional varieties of Swedish. The first involves a method for modelling intonation using the SWING (SWedish INtonation Generator) tool, where annotated speech samples are resynthesised with rule-based intonation and audio-visually analysed wit...

We discuss three constructions which seem to modify the illocutionary force of an utterance: reverse-polarity tag questions [RP-tags] (1a), same-polarity tag questions [SP-tags] (1b), and non-interrogative rising intonation [NI-rise] (1c). Rising intonation is indicated with a question mark (“?”).1 Rising intonation on syntactically declarative sentences (1c) has been discussed in Gunlogson (20...

Although the pitch of the human voice is continuously variable, some linguists contend that intonation in speech is restricted to a small, limited set of patterns. This claim is tested by asking subjects to mimic a block of 100 randomly generated intonation contours and then to imitate themselves in several successive sessions. The produced f0 contours gradually converge towards a limited set o...

In this paper we investigate information pertaining to the intonation of swaras (scale-degrees) in Hindustani Classical Music for automatically identifying ragas. We briefly explain why raga identification is an interesting problem and the various attributes that characterize a raga. We look at two approaches by other authors that exploit some of these characteristics. Then we review musicologi...

This paper deals with intonation of spontaneous Russian. It contains a description of the principles of prosodic annotation used in the new corpus of spontaneous speech—CoRuSS, and statistical data derived from this corpus. The prosodic annotation system was developed specially for the purpose; it is an extension and development of a well-known system of Intonation Constructions by E. A. Bryzgu...

Infant-directed speech exhibits slower speech rate, higher pitch and larger f0 excursions than adult-directed speech. Apart from these phonetic properties established in many languages, little is known on the intonational phonological structure in individual languages, i.e. pitch accents and boundary tones and their frequency distribution. Here, we investigated the intonation of infant-directed...