This paper proposes a prosodic structure and the tonal pattern of Georgian, the national language of Georgia. The language has three prosodic units above the Word: Intonation Phrase (IP), Intermediate Phrase (ip), and Accentual Phrase (AP). All these units are marked by a boundary tone, but an AP in Georgian is unique typologically in that it has pitch accent linked to a stressed syllable and p...

This paper proposes a method to extract prosodic features from a speech signal by leveraging auxiliary linguistic information. A prosodic feature extractor called the statistical phrase/accent command estimation (SPACE) has recently been proposed. This extractor is based on a statistical model formulated as a stochastic counterpart of the Fujisaki model, a wellfounded mathematical model represe...

In this paper, we explore acoustic correlates of pitch accent and main lexical stress in American English, and the interaction of these cues with other factors that affect prosody. In a controlled study, we varied presence or absence and type of pitch accent (L∗ vs H∗), boundary-related tone sequence (L-L% vs. HH%) and gender of the talker, for the sentence “Dagada gave Bobby doodads”. The meas...

This paper presents a comparative study on the temporal alignment of pitch peaks of H*L accents in Polish and German. Speech material used in the study came from the unit selection synthesis corpora of the Polish voice module of the BOSS system and the IMS German Festival TTS system. The major factors investigated were concerned with the influence of syllable structure on the one hand, as well ...

A method was developed to utilize linguistic information (lexical accent types and syntactic boundaries) to improve the performance of the automatic extraction of the F0 contour generation process model commands. The extraction scheme is first to smooth the observed F0 contour by a piecewise 3 order polynomial function and to locate accent command positions by taking the derivative of the funct...

When synthesizing speech from Japanese text, correct assignment of accent nuclei for input text with arbitrary contents is indispensable in obtaining naturally-sounding synthetic speech. A phenomenon called accent sandhi occurs in utterances of Japanese; when a word is uttered in a sentence, its accent nucleus may change depending on the contexts of preceding/succeeding words. This paper descri...

In the intonation of polar questions in the Northern Russian dialect of Varzuga (Kola Peninsula), two different intonation patterns are frequently used: the Standard Russian H*L pitch accent, with a high rise and immediate fall, but also a “broad hat” pattern, in which the high rise is followed by a late fall, aligned to the first syllable after the last lexical stress. This contour does not fi...

Major syntactic boundaries are often accompanied by a rise in the phrase component of the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Detecting such rises, therefore, can be signi cantly helpful to the speech recognition process. We developed a method to detect syntactic boundaries with phrasecomponent rise (henceforth, phrase boundaries), based on the compression of the accent component of the F0 cont...

The current study examines the relationship between intonational gestures as given by the accent commands of the Fujisaki model and the syllabic grid on the example of spontaneous American English from the Buckeye Corpus. As an initial step the data were labelled according to American English ToBI conventions. Intensity contours were extracted from the band-filtered speech signal and modelled u...

The phrase-final accent can typically contain a multitude of simultaneous prosodic signals. In this study, aimed at separating the effects of lexical tone from phrase-final intonation, phrase-final accents of two dialects of Kammu were analyzed. Kammu, a Mon-Khmer language spoken primarily in northern Laos, has dialects with lexical tones and dialects with no lexical tones. Both dialects seem t...