Automatic labeling of prosodic features is an important topic when constructing large speech databases for speech synthesis or analysis purposes. Perceptually-related F0 parameters are proposed with the aim of automatically classifying phrase final tones. Analyses are conducted to verify how consistently subjects are able to categorize phrase final tones, and how perceptual features are related...

This paper aims to examine the interaction of intonation and lexical tone within the framework of Articulatory Phonology, by investigating the timing relationship between oral articulatory gestures and tone-related/intonation-related F0 dynamics. Specifically, we compared the consonant-vowel-F0 (C-V-T) coordinative patterns at phrase-final position and at phrase-medial position. We found that t...

The current paper examines the effect of tone coarticulation in Mandarin on the amplitude and duration of tone commands of the Fujisaki model and whether declination needs to be taken into account when synthesizing F0 contours of Mandarin. Based on a corpus of short sentences mean parameters of the Fujisaki-model were calculated for the 15 combinations of Mandarin tones. The resulting smoothed ...

This study uses production and perception experiments to explore tone 3 focus in Mandarin Chinese. Overall, contrastive focus in Mandarin is clearly marked with increased duration, intensity, and pitch range: in the experiments, listeners identified focused syllables correctly more than 90% of the time. However, a tone 3 syllable offers a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion under focus, ...

Taiwanese tone sandhi, although a phrase-level pattern, has been argued to be essentially lexicalized. We thus expected it to be phonetically categorical and insensitive to pragmatic context. To test these predictions, we had native speakers read aloud pairs of sentences identical except for morphemes expected to be neutralized by tone sandhi, both across and within prosodic positions. Speakers...

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...

We investigate the relationship between phonetic phrasing, tonal pattern and phrase structure in left peripherical sentence topic. Our corpus consists of three task-oriented Italian dialogues. The results of prosodic analysis show that topics are usually associated to the highest pitch values in the Tone Unit, regardless to their actual syntactic position. Syntactic analysis shows that, while t...

Duration measurements of long and short high vowels in the Limburgish dialect of Maastricht show that these vowels have a relatively contextfree durational difference compared to the durational difference found between members of tonal minimal pairs in the dialect. The latter have a substantial duration difference in intonation-phrase final position, but a much reduced difference in phrase-inte...

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...

This paper deals with F0 declination in Russian. The study was conducted using statistical data derived from the Corpus of Professionally Read Speech. The results confirm the relationship between F0 slope and the utterance length for Russian. At the same time they reveal a) individual strategies in preplanning declination slope of the phrase or utterance; b) strong dependency of the F0 slope on...