Vowel devoicing at phrase boundaries is shown to depend on sentence mode (statement, question) and information structure (non-contrastive vs. contrastive and broad vs. narrow focus), which affect the type of nuclear accent and boundary tone. In li-questions, considerably less devoicing of the vowels before the phrase boundary is found than in other conditions, because the rising boundary contou...

In a comparison of the tonal grammars of two German dialects, Swabian and Upper Saxon German, we observe a particular type of intonation contour that is similar in surface form, yet differs phonologically. Phonetically, the contour’s shape is risingfalling; phonologically, the Swabian contour reads as L*H +L 0%, and the one of Upper Saxon as L+ H*L 0%. Both contours are marked ones, and arise t...

This paper explores the nature of prosodic phrasing in Kashaya, an endangered language of northern California, as diagnosed by the location of accent. Previous work has reported that iambic feet are constructed across prosodic phrases that can consist of multiple words, but there has been little research into how these pphrases interact with syntactic constituency. We propose an alignment analy...

Modeling intonation, i.e., specifying adequate fundamental frequency (F0) contours, remains a challenging task for speech synthesis systems. This paper discusses the development of a system for phonetically specifying intonation contours for German. It deals with the problem of translating an abstract phonological representation of intonation namely the tone-sequence model into a concrete phone...

This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, tone interaction, focus effects, 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. Based on quantitative data, we propose that the underlying tone of pitch accent is H*+L and that the left edge of a proso...

The prosodic realization of focus can vary depending on various factors such as type of focus (e.g., information focus, corrective focus), morphosyntax (whether or not a language has a morpho-syntactic marker of focus), and intonational phonology of language, and thus is language-specific. On one hand, head-prominence languages such as English, German, and Greek, mark prominence through the use...

This study proposes an Autosegmental-Metrical model of Turkish intonation based on sentences produced in neutral focus, as part of our ongoing research investigating Turkish intonational phonology. Tonal patterns of utterances were examined by varying the length of a word and a phrase, the location of stress, syntactic structures, and sentence types. Preliminary results suggest that Turkish has...

A perceptual experiment concerning South Swedish word accents (accent I, accent II) is described. By means of editing and resynthesis techniques the F0 pattern of a test word in a phrase context has been systematically manipulated: initial rise (glide vs. jump) and final concatenation (6 timing degrees of the accentual fall). The results indicate that both a gliding rise and a late fall seem ne...

A corpus-based method was developed for automatic extraction of the F0 contour generation process model parameters (phrase and accent commands). The method first smoothes the observed F0 contour by a piecewise 3rd order polynomial function and finds points of inflection. Then several parameters related to the points are used as input parameters for the predictor of the model commands. Finally t...

In Tokyo Japanese, lexical accent is implemented by pitch pattern control, while phrasal stress patterns, along with pitch variation, convey non-lexical information in discourse. The C/D model represents pitch control by the tonal melody and stress control by the skeletal organization of the utterance. Phonetic implementation of pitch contours is exemplified here for different lexical accent pa...