Despite the apparent simplicity, measuring the position of f0 peaks can produce unexpected results. In any model of intonation where the fundamental frequency is derived from both an intonation component and a segmental component (e.g. consonantal perturbations or the intrinsic f0 shifts of vowels), the measured peak position does not equal the peak of the intonation component. The difference c...

The question intonation patterns of Mandarin and Cantonese are distinctive. While Mandarin relies on the global F0 contour, Cantonese depends on a boundary tone. A crosslinguistic perception test was conducted with Mandarin and Cantonese listeners to investigate their use of pitch in identifying intonation patterns in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Forced identification tasks were used. The...

We propose to control intonation in unit selection speech synthesis with a mixed CART-HMM intonation model. The Finite State Machine (FSM) formulation is suited to incorporate the intonation model in the unit selection framework because it allows for combination of models with different unit types and handling competing intonative variants. Subjective experiments have been carried out to compar...

The study intends to present results obtained from a methodology of intonation teaching, based on metacognition assumptions (Flavell, 1976; Gombert, 1992; Ribeiro, 2003). has five stages labelled as: 1 - learner's awareness the transfering their mother tongue (LM) into target foreign language (LEA); 2 description intonational contour total and partial interrogative utterances; 3-perception; 4-m...

This study aims at investigating the interface between emotion and intonation patterns (more specifically, duration and pitch amplitude of speech). To this end, the acoustic properties of spectral parameters related to speech prosody are investigated. The results of acoustic and Statistical analysis show that mean level and range of FO in the contours vary strongly as a function of the degree o...

This paper presents a modular TTS system (called MINGUS) which exploits syntactic information contained in the input and allows additional annotation of the input in order to obtain particular intonation contours or to vary most prosodic parameters. This system is based on a tonal representation of French intonation, on a model of the interaction between syntax and prosody, and on a model of th...