The present study examines the relative impact of segments and intonation on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, specifically investigating the separate contribution of segmental and intonational information to perceived foreign accent in Korean-accented English. Two English speakers and two Korean speakers recorded 40 English sentences. The sentences were manipulated by combi...

For years linguists have noted that intonation patterns and sentence-final discourse particles encode similar meanings across languages (e.g., [23], [21]). Yet the division of labor between the two kinds of systems—and in particular whether there exists a compensatory distribution between them— remains to be clarified. In this article, we focus on two languages within the Romance group (Catalan...

We propose a physiologically based intonation model using perceptual relevance. Motivated by speech synthesis from a speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) point of view, we aim at a language independent way of modelling intonation. The model presented in this paper can be seen as a generalisation of the command response (CR) model, albeit with the same modelling power. It is an additive model whi...

Tone languages are often reported to make use of utterancelevel intonation as well as of lexical tone. We test the alternative hypotheses that a) the coexistence of lexical tone and utterance-level intonation in tone languages results in a diminished functional load for intonation, and b) that lexical tone and intonation can coexist in tone languages without undermining each other’s functional ...

The speech fundamental frequency (henceforth F0) contour plays an important role in expressing the affective information of an utterance. The most popular F0 modeling approaches mainly use the concept of separating the F0 contour into a global trend and local variation. For Mandarin, the global trend of the F0 contour is caused by the speaker’s mood and emotion. In this paper, the authors addre...

In an RT experiment, subjects were asked to respond with minimal responses to prerecorded dialogs and a manipulated version of these dialogs that contained only intonation and pause information. Response delays and, especially, variances were higher to the impoverished, intonation only, stimuli than to the original recordings. It was also found that intonation only utterances ending in a mid-fr...

Aiming to provide the synthetic speech with the ability to express speaker’s intentions and subtle nuances, we investigated the relationship between the speaker’s intentions that the listener perceived and sentence-final particle/intonation combinations in Japanese conversational speech. First, we classified F0 contours of sentence-final syllables in actual speech and found various distinctive ...

In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study which aims at describing the discourse meaning of rises at right edge intonation boundaries in French dialogues. According to most French speakers, it is possible to turn an assertion into a question in French solely by pronouncing it with a rising intonation. While existing empirical studies [8, 7] confirm that there is some correlatio...

It is well established that lexical tones and intonation are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, the presence or absence of lexical tones in a language does not by itself constitute a fundamental typological divide for intonation systems. Two dimensions of typological diversity are brought out: (i) concerning lexical tone systems, it is suggested that the analysis of contour tones into sequences ...

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...