The current study addresses the question of how word-level (“stress”) and phraseor sentence-level prominence (“accent”) is realized in Polish. For this purpose, a production experiment eliciting semi-spontaneous utterances was conducted, closely following the methodological approach introduced in [1]. Our acoustic analyses are based on identical target syllables which are embedded in sentences ...

This article presents a discussion of a number of algorithms being developed which will enable the generation of prosodic structure for Swedish restricted texts. These algorithms, including a word-class tagger, a complex-word identifier and a prosodic parser form part of a linguistic preprocessor to a text-to-speech system for generation of intonation. PROSODIC STRUCTURE One of the goals of cur...

Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphonesynthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias towards newness, whereas L*H, lik...

This paper shows how focus prosody of South Kyungsang Korean interacts with the prosodic structure of the dialect. Based on the prosodic structure defined by intonation, it is claimed that the domain of lexical pitch accent assignment is a Prosodic Word, but the prosodic domain of focus, or the realization of focus prominence, is an Accentual Phrase. This model can explain the phenomenon of mis...

This paper presents an intonation model which determines intonation contours over intonation phrases. The model is described by four elements: communicative type of an intonation phrase; number of accent groups in it; position of the nuclear accent group in it; and set of target intonation points. Individualization of the model is based on semiautomatic analysis of speaker database. The model w...

Previous studies have proposed that, along with the final accent, the French phonological system includes an Initial Accent which has rhythmic functions. Descriptions of English prosody propose that an early accent marks Major Phonological Phrases. The present study investigates the structural and rhythmic functions of IA in French at various levels of phonological structure. Results on the occ...

Many formal linguists hold that English pitch accent has a single function: marking focus. On the other hand, there is evidence from corpus work and from psycholinguistics that pitch accent is attracted to expressions which are unpredictable. We present a two-factor pragmatic account in which both focus and predictability contribute to the placement of accent in an English intonational phrase. ...

This paper introduces Stem-ML, which is a model of the prosody generation process with an associated description language, and suggests how it may help prosody recognition. We applied Stem-ML modeling to three topics: the modeling of prosodic strengths, intonation types, and noun phrase patterns. Stem-ML parameters derived from )&* contours may have a more consistent relationship with prosodic ...

When developing Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) systems, algorithms to accurately predict accent types of each constituent phrase is essential for better output speech quality. In our previous studies on the accent type estimation, a CRF-based method was realized. Although this method outperformed the conventional rule-based method, the estimation accuracy of particular phrases such as those incl...

Near-perfect atttomatic accent assignment is attainable,for citation-s~le speech, but better computational models art, needed to predict accent in extended, spontaneous discourses. This paper presents an empirically motivated theory of the discourse ]bcttsing nature of accent in spontaneous speech. Hypotheses based on this theory lead to a new approach to accent prediction, in which patterns o ...