Phrase accents, one of the three tonal categories assumed by much recent research on intonation, are expected to associate with a prosodic boundary (e.g. the end of the utterance) but not to phonetically align with a specific tone-bearing unit (TBU), such as a stressed syllable. This paper presents experimental evidence on the intonation of Cypriot Greek polar questions suggesting that phrase a...

The present paper describes a case of late pitch peak placement in West Swedish. In the Swedish prosodic typology this dialect type belongs to the double-peaked dialects, where the first pitch peak of a word in focus represents word accent proper and the second peak focal accent. In phrase-final position the focal accent H appears to seek the edge of the phrase, while in nonfinal position it se...

In this paper, we propose an automatic method for detecting accent phrase boundaries in Japanese continuous speech by using F0 information. In the training phase, hand labeled accent patterns are parameterized according to a superpositional model proposed by Fujisaki, and assigned to some clusters by a clustering method, in which accent templates are calculated as centroid of each cluster. In t...

This paper presents an automatic algorithm to extract the discrete phrase and accent commands with their timing parameters from the speech wave. This algorithm is based on dynamic programming (also called DP algorithm) and least square error methods. The DP algorithm is composed of two steps. First, it decides the timing of the phrase commands; then, it determines the suitable parameters of phr...

Prediction of symbolic prosodic labels (pitch accents and phrase structure) is an important step in generating natural synthetic speech. This paper investigates a new automatically trainable procedure for combined accent and phrase prediction based on transformational rule-based learning. Experimental results on a radio news corpus show that accent prediction bene ts from phrase structure, but ...

This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, the domain of tone interaction, and the prosodic structure of Northern Kyungsang Korean (NKK) by examining tone-syllable alignment and the realization of pitch accent in different tonal/prosodic contexts. Sixty-four sentences produced by six native speakers of NKK were digitized and f0 values of each syllable as well as the f...

Intonational typology has recently begun to scrutinize the typology of accent beyond the common binary distinction of ‘stress accent’ and ‘pitch accent’ (or ‘non-stress’ accent). Contributing to this research, this study considers the phonetic correlates of accent and its patterns of distribution in the Kuninjku dialect of Bininj Gun-wok (BGW), a polysynthetic language spoken in Northern Austra...

This paper describes the principal features of the intonational system of Chickasaw, a Muskogean language spoken in southcentral Oklahoma. Results of the study are as follows. The Intonational Phrase (IP) consists of one or more Accentual Phrases (AP) which can be larger or smaller than a word. The underlying tonal pattern of the AP is [LHHL]. Chickasaw statements are characteristically marked ...

The present paper presents the results of a cross-language analysis with 10 L1 German speakers who have learned Swedish for at least 18 months. In an imitation and a perception experiment they had to produce and identify the Swedish word accents in the first post-focal position. 15 L1 Swedish speakers took part in the same perception experiment and also evaluated the imitations of the L1 German...

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 3rd order polynomial function and to locate accent command positions by taking the derivative of the fun...