This paper describes a method for evaluating the quality of synthetic intonation using subjective techniques. This perceptual method of assessing intonation, not only evaluates the quality of synthetic intonation, but also allows us to compare different models of intonation to know which one is the most natural from a perceptual point of view. This procedure has been used to assess the quality ...

Previous work suggests that methods used in studying categorical perception for segmental contrasts may be useful in determining the representation of suprasegmental contrasts, particularly those based on intonational characteristics. This experiment investigated phonological representations for intonation contours in English by determining the extent of categorical effects in a task involving ...

In this paper we identify intonation cues that can disambiguate confirmation-seeking questions in adult-child dialogue in European Portuguese (EP). 301 examples of confirmation requests answered by two children and uttered by three different adults were analysed. Results show that (i) most confirmation-seeking questions (92.7%) do not present the intonation pattern previously identified for inf...

The aim of this study was to investigate the perception of intonation-induced changes in tone in Cantonese. Previous studies have showed that the F0 level and contour of tones are likely to be modified by different intonations. As perception of tones depends primarily on the fundamental frequency (F0) pattern, it is likely that these intonation-induced changes in F0 will affect listeners’ perce...

This study investigated how Mandarin listeners process tone and intonation when the F0 encodings of the lexical tone and intonation are in conflict or in congruency and the role context plays during these processes. Tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted within neutral vs. constraining semantic contexts. Tone identification was much easier than intonation identification i...

Previous work suggests that methods used in studying categorical perception for segmental contrasts may be useful in determining the representation of suprasegmental contrasts, particularly those based on intonational characteristics. This experiment investigated phonological representations for intonation contours in English by determining the extent of categorical effects in a task involving ...

This study examines acoustic and articulatory EMA data of two female speakers (American and Japanese) spontaneously producing emotional speech while engaged in an informal telephone-type conversation. A set of control data in which the speakers imitated or read the original emotional utterance was also recorded; for the American speaker, the intonation pattern was also imitated. The results sug...

A corpus-based concatenative speech synthesis system using no signal processing can produce intelligible synthetic speech maintaining original voice characteristics, but it can sometimes be di cult to realize natural prosody. In such a concatenative system, it is very important to select appropriate waveform segments that are naturally close to the target prosody. This paper describes some appr...

A number of data-based approaches to intonation modeling represent F0 movements using continuous parameters. This is contradictory to most intonation theories, which suggest that intonation can be modeled with a set of distinct phonological entities that are phonetically realized as F0 movements. This principle has rarely been incorporated into data-based intonation modeling. In this study we c...

Those learning foreign languages often experience problems in generating correct intonation. Therefore, several attempts have been made to support the teaching of intonation with the help of devices that display the pitch of speech. This paper deals with the development of a visual intonation-display system. In this system, the visual feedback of intonation is given as a continuous representati...