Since Bolinger’s [1] discovery that pitch cues accentual prominence in English, a tension has arisen between two strategies: equating accent with pitch excursions and relying on perception for identifying accented words. This paper investigates the relation between prominence judgments from untrained listeners and accentual labels produced by trained transcribers. Naïve speakers of English, Spa...

The paper combines the Fujisaki commandresponse model and the ToBI convention to analyze the English sentence prosody produced by American native speakers and Korean and Chinese English learners. The model parameters were extracted by FujiParaEditor for nine short sentences produced by three groups of speakers. The ToBI-tanscribed results were compared with the model parameters. Results show th...

Two transcribers have labeled prosodic events independently on a subset of Switchboard corpus using adapted ToBI (TOnes and Break Indices) system. Transcriptions of two types of pitch accents (H* and L*), phrasal accents (Hand L-) and boundary tones (H% and L%) encoded independently by two transcribers are compared for intertranscriber reliability. Two commonly used methods of reliability measu...

We have developed the very first free online and free framework for teaching and learning Japanese prosody with features for word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1], which provides three functions. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. ...

We developed the very first online and free framework for teaching and learning Japanese prosody including word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1], which provides three functions. Subjective assessment by teachers shows very high pedagogical effectiveness of the framework.

abstract~ Tile primary purpose of this paper is to present a set of conditions that constrain accent placement in focused nominally ptemodified NPs. Selkirk (1984) argues that if the premodifier is an argument of the head, then the head can be deaccented. I agree with Selkirk's proposal and argue that what is essential is not whether the premodifier is a grammatical argument of the head noun, b...

This paper presents a mathematical description of style in speech and singing. These styles are represented as a set of portable prosodic features along with a set of rules to choose where the features are to be applied. Speakers and singers make creative choices to express their personal style, which may involve specific accent shapes, phrase curves, or (similarly) musical embellishment. There...

This paper outlines a new approach to Tokyo Japanese intonation synthesis, in which the F0 contour of an utterance is generated using the superposition of multi-level phrase curves and lexical accent curves, coupled with linear alignment models which determine the precise alignment of the curves with the segmental material. We first discuss the construction of a phrase curve used to model the p...

This paper investigates whether or not presence or absence of a post-FOCUS Minor Phonological Phrase boundary in Tokyo Japanese is conditioned by grammatical factors such as the presence or absence of a syntactic boundary and a pitch accent. Each boundary of a Minor Phonological Phrase (henceforth Minor Phrase or MiP) coincides with an F0 rise from the initial syllable to the second syllable. T...

A data-driven method of fundamental frequency (F0) contour synthesis was developed for Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) conversion systems. In the method, synthesis is done using the F0 contour generation process model, and the model parameters for each accent phrase are estimated using statistical methods. Although it was already shown that the synthesized F0 contours sounded highly natural as th...