This paper presents an analysis on the functions carried by phrase final tones in turn-taking and dialog acts, taking into account linguistic information about the part of speech (particles and auxiliary verbs) attributed to the morphemes at phrase finals. Natural conversational speech data are segmented in inter-pause units, and each utterance unit is arranged according to the phrase final mor...

An attitude recognizer of a speaker which uses prosodic features of speech is proposed and it is successfully applied to the dialogue system aiming at agreement formation. We use not only linguistic information but also some sorts of additional information supporting linguistic information in our human communication. In agreement formation dialogues, we are often required to express our attitud...

Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependenci...

In this paper, a template-driven generation of prosodic information is proposed for Chinese text-to-speech conversion. A set of monosyllable-based synthesis units is selected from a large continuous speech database. The speech database is employed to establish a word-prosody-based template tree according to the linguistic features: tone combination, word length, part-of-speech (POS) of the word...

Speaker age is an important paralinguistic feature in speech which has to be considered in the study of phonetic variation. Knowledge about this feature may be used to improve speech technology applications, e.g. automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis. The present thesis describes six studies of several phonetic aspects of age-related variation in speech. As the speech production mec...

1 Project 19774035. Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China. This research is conducted under guidance of two professors: Bao Huaiqiao, Choijongjab. [Abstract] This thesis proves that the main acoustic feature of Mongolian bisyllabic words is the duration of the vowels after analysis and generalization of the acoustic pattern of the prosodic features of monosyllabic and bisyll...

The acoustic manifestations of the prosodic features are heavily influenced by the segmental compositions of the utterances. In order to study the acoustic correlates of the prosodic features it is necessary to diminish the influence of the segments. In investigations about the fundamental frequency contour utterances built up of only sonorants are often used and thereby the influence of constr...

Various studies have examined the acoustic features in infant directed speech (IDS) and adult directed speech (ADS). However, there are few speech corpora with prominence annotation from multiple listeners or analysis of the acoustic properties of the stressed versus unstressed words, most studies and corpora focusing on syllabic stress. In order to fill this gap, the current study analyzes the...

Recent studies of the acoustic correlates of various prosodic elements in American English, such as prominence (in the form of phrase-level pitch accents and word-level lexical stress) and boundaries (in the form of boundary-marking tones), have begun to clarify the nature of the acoustic cues to different types and levels of these prosodic markers. This study focuses on the importance of contr...