A set of rules is proposed for the automatic synthesis of natural-sounding intonation as part of speech synthesis in Dutch from unrestricted text. Results of a formal perceptual evaluation show that the synthetic intonation is judged to be as natural as human intonation for isolated utterances; for texts, additional provisions are required to model contributions of text structure. It is suggest...

examine phonetic trends such as fundamental frequency (F0) peak placement and downstepping contours. These studies provide important insight into the intonation of laboratory (i.e. read or scripted) speech, however, much remains undiscovered about spontaneous speech intonation in Spanish. One study addressing this issue, Face (2003), compares the intonation of Peninsular Spanish declaratives in...

In the last fifteen years, there have been major paradigm shifts in both general and applied linguistics toward acknowledging intonation as an indispensable component of language and communication. In addition, the hardware and software for conducting acoustic phonetic signal analysis have recently become more accessible. The main goal of this paper is thus to integrate the two seemingly dispar...

In tonal languages, there are potential conflicts between the FO-based changes due to the coexistence of intonation and lexical tones. In the present study, the interaction of tone and intonation in Cantonese was examined using acoustic and perceptual analyses. The acoustic patterns of tones at the initial, medial, and final positions of questions and statements were measured. Results showed th...

The objective of the study was to find out whether there is a connection between the perception of linguistic intonation contours and emotional intonation. Twenty-four subjects were asked to identify and discriminate emotional prosody listening to subtests 8A and 8B of the Tübinger Affect Battery as well as to 36 utterances that differed in linguistic intonation contour and were first presented...

Studying intonational variation conveying the expression of emotion in speech is presented here as being particularly attractive when the pitch variation is represented in the theoretical framework of a model of intonation. Using such a framework while considering the meaning associated with these variations in terms of identification of emotion in speech facilitates a generalization of study r...

OBJECTIVES Current cochlear implant (CI) devices are limited in providing voice pitch information that is critical for listeners' recognition of prosodic contrasts of speech (e.g., intonation and lexical tones). As a result, mastery of the production and perception of such speech contrasts can be very challenging for prelingually deafened individuals who received a CI in their childhood (i.e., ...

Sentences with contrastive intonation are assumed to presuppose contextual alternatives to the accented elements. Two cross-modal priming experiments tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives are automatically available to listeners. Contrastive associates – but not noncontrastive associates were facilitated only when primes were produced in sentences with contrastive intonation, ind...