One major feature of the prosody of Mandarin Chinese speech flow is prosodic phrase grouping [1, 2, and 3]. Phrasal and sentential intonations are governed by a prosody framework that structurally group phrases into a larger/longer and identifiable unit. An overall prosody pattern of such phrase grouping with prosodic specifications is superimposed on phrase group. In turn, individual phrasal i...

Data scarcity in corpus-based intonation modelling for TTS applications is addressed. We propose to apply a searching process to a list of dictionaries of classes of intonation patterns previously trained from corpus to avoid problems associated with the scarce number of samples in the classes. Results indicate that better results are obtained in comparison with previous alternatives where the ...

Based on the concept of intonation pattern and the method of fluctuation scale, this paper qualitatively and quantitatively conducts a preliminary research focused on the pitch representations of the sentence and tone group ranges of statement and declarative question in English and makes a comparatively detailed study on the pitch movements between the two intonation moods. The findings point ...

This paper addresses the modelling in text-to-speech of the rising intonation pattern in American English which is often found in yes-no questions. A small corpus containing yes-no questions was recorded and analysed. F0 was then modelled using an automatic procedure. The paper also reports on the stability of alignment of F0 targets in rising intonation patterns.

This study assessed perception of suprasegmental features of speech by 30 prelingual children with sensorineural hearing loss. Ten children had cochlear implants (CIs), and 20 children wore hearing aids (HA): 10 with severe hearing loss and 10 with profound hearing loss. Perception of intonation, syllable stress, word emphasis, and word pattern was assessed. Results revealed that the two HA gro...

This chapter examines how politeness in offers and requests is encoded by intonation in Catalan, a language which uses two distinct intonational pitch contours for unbiased yes-no questions. Fifteen Central Catalan speakers participated in a Discourse Completion Task that elicited offers and requests in scenarios controlled for level of social distance, power, and cost of the action. The data w...

The use of two markers of prosodic finality in French, vowel lengthening and high vowel breathiness/devoicing, were compared among statements and questions of various types (echo-questions, Wh-questions, questions with inverted subject and verb). The comparison focuses on the relation between sentence-final intonation and the other markers of finality. The intonation pattern of statements and W...

We present a system for the classification of intonation patterns in human robot interaction. The system distinguishes questions from other types of utterances and can deal with additional reverberations, background noise, as well as music interfering with the speech signal. The main building blocks of our system are a multi channel source separation, robust fundamental frequency extraction and...

The standard evaluation of intonation models is by means of non-referenced subjective tests (pair or MOS) in which subjects rate the quality or compare different samples without any explicit reference. These tests are usually conducted on an isolated sentence basis. However, for a single sentence, with no contextual information, there are multiple valid intonations. A subject’s preference over ...

This technical report documents experiment into stylization of the f0 curve on Standard Yorùbá (SY ) syllables as well as a technique for intonation modelling. A number of interpolation polynomials were evaluated using root mean square error and mean opinion score techniques. The stylisation experiment resulted in the selection of a 3 degree polynomial for modelling the f0 curves on Yorùbá syll...