Word emphasis and question intonation have significant effects on F0 contours for various languages. This paper employs the command-response F0 model to investigate the effects of the two factors for Cantonese, a typical tone language with nine tones. Analysis shows that the main effect of word emphasis associated with narrow focus is not on tone command but on phrase command. An additional or ...

This study investigates mechanisms of question intonation in Mandarin Chinese. Three mechanisms of question intonation have been proposed: an overall higher phrase curve, higher strengths of sentence final tones, and a tone-dependent mechanism that flattens the falling slope of the final falling tone and steepens the rising slope of the final rising tone. The phrase curve and strength mechanism...

Emphasis has significant effect on F0 contours in various languages, among which tone languages require more careful study because their F0 contours show complex interaction between lexical tones and phrase intonation. Here we employ the command-response model to investigate the effect of paralinguistic emphasis in Cantonese, a typical tone language with nine lexical tones. Following our previo...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the nature of the high tones realized on finally stressed words in Turkish. Following Ipek & Jun’s [1] AM model of intonational phonology of Turkish, it was hypothesized that the high tone realized on the last syllable of a phrase (i.e., Intermediate Phrase (ip)) is realized differently from that of a phrase-medial prosodic word (PW), reflecting the pros...

This paper presents one of the first acoustic investigations into the realization of tone in Sesotho, a Southern African language, employing a set of recorded minimal pairs, whose F0 contours are analyzed using the Fujisaki model. Analysis of model parameters shows that high tones are associated with tone commands whereas low tones either follow the phrase contour or are marked by creaky voice....

Recently it has been proposed to base intonational typology on the way languages convey focus (pragmatic prominence). Generally, languages can enhance, add or delete phrase boundary tones (phrase languages) or add an extra pitch accent (intonation languages) to mark focus. Tone languages are somewhat problematic for this typology as it is difficult to make direct observations on their sentence ...

Problem statement: Tone of a tonal language is an important feature of a prosodic syllable to identify the meanings of that syllable or that part of word. Ii is very crucial to model the feature related to tone of speech to achieve the most naturalness in speech communication. Approach: The study presents an approach to analyze the model parameters of Thai tones for two genders. The successive ...

In this paper, a rule-based method was developed for realizing phrase components in our two-step generation of fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin. The scheme assumes (logarithmic) F0 contours as superposition of tone components on phrase components, which are further assumed to be responses of phrase commands. In general, possibility of a new phrase command comes higher at deeper s...

This paper presents a case study looking at the interaction between lexical tone and post-lexical intonation in two very similar Tibetic language varieties spoken in Nepal: Lamjung Yolmo and Kagate. In these two varieties, we find preliminary evidence that in both monosyllabic and disyllabic words, lexical tone is only specified at the left edge of the word, while the right edge of the word is ...

The present study investigates the effects of prosodic boundary on the acoustic realization of allophonic Mandarin lexical tone creak. Speech of twenty speakers from Mandarin Call Home corpus was analyzed. Results show that stronger creaky voice occurs more often at the end of an utterance than the end of an intermediary phrase, and is least likely to occur phrase medially. The observed creak i...