Do lexical tones interfere with the realization of intonation types? Given that tone and intonation both use F0 as a primary cue, can a listener reliably identify statements and questions when some of the channel capacity is taken up by lexical tones? We study this issue through a perception test on a carefully designed and obtained intonation corpus on Mandarin Chinese. Our study shows the fol...

Changes in intonation patterns may convey not only different meaning but different emotions even if the sequence of speech segments are same in a sentence. The patterns change depending upon structure and emotion of the sentence and require being stored in speech database. It is a difficult and time-consuming task to store all utterances of all the expressive style, which also consumes huge mem...

This study addresses turn taking in everyday Mandarin conversation from a phonetic perspective, in particular, suprasegmental analysis. The acoustic data are based on 103 exchanges from two conversations – one structured and one free. The results show that turn final cues are mostly signaled via various falling intonation patterns in Mandarin conversation. Some anomalies exist and these are ana...

BACKGROUND Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a motor speech disorder in which a variety of segmental and suprasegmental errors lead to the perception of a new accent in speech. Whilst changes in intonation have been identified to contribute considerably to the perceived alteration in accent, research has rarely focused on how these changes impact on the pragmatic use of intonation. However, a gr...

This paper presents an intonation model which determines intonation contours over intonation phrases. The model is described by four elements: communicative type of an intonation phrase; number of accent groups in it; position of the nuclear accent group in it; and set of target intonation points. Individualization of the model is based on semiautomatic analysis of speaker database. The model w...

In this paper a quantitative description of German intonation is presented. It will be demonstrated that intonation contours can be efficiently analyzed, and predicted, by interpreting the components and parameters of Fujisaki’s model in terms of linguistic features and categories. It will also be argued that a superpositionally organized model is particularly suitable for a quantitatve descrip...

A new approach for intonation stylization is introduced, that enables the extraction of an intonation representation from prosodically unlabeled data. This approach yields global and local intonation contour classes arising from a contour-based, parametric and superpositional intonation stylization. Based on findings about the linguistic interpretation of the contour classes derived from corpus...

The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut Quechua, have a rich morphological layer which discourse-level features are mapped but limited use intonation. Instead, English Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey to relatively large extent. We propose the difference found in these two pa...

Chironomy means in this paper of intonation modeling in terms of hand movements. An experiment in hand-controlled intonation reiteration is described. A system for real-time intonation modification driven by a graphic tablet is presented. This system is used for reiterating a speech corpus (sentences of 1 to 9 syllables, natural and reiterant speech). The subjects also produced vocal imitation ...