Recent studies of the acoustic correlates of various prosodic elements in American English, such as prominence (in the form of phrase-level pitch accents and word-level lexical stress) and boundaries (in the form of boundary-marking tones), have begun to clarify the nature of the acoustic cues to different types and levels of these prosodic markers. This study focuses on the importance of contr...

This paper presents a novel approach for avoiding f0 discontinuities in the framework of a unit selection model of intonation with the accent group contour as the basic unit for concatenation. Taking as input the resulting contour of the model, it is modified on an accent group basis according to the typical decomposition into phrase and accent curves of the superpositional models. Results are ...

This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours –the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request– align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the ‘nuclear’ acce...

This paper presents original data in support of a new model of intonational phonology for Malay as spoken in Singapore. Building on the Autosegmental-Metrical approach (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986), we propose that intonational variation in Malay can be explained in terms of underlying sequences of abstract tonal units (H and L), which are aligned to the edges and internal syllables of prosod...

This article presents an outline of the prosodic constituent structure which will be incorporated in a linguistic preprocessor forming part of a text-to-speech system for generation of intonation in Swedish restricted texts. INTRODUCTION One of the goals of current research in text-to-speech systems is to improve the quality of intonation by developing algorithms for preprocessing texts in orde...

In this paper we discuss an algorithm for the assignment of pitch accent positions in text-to-speech conversion. The algorithm is closely modeled on current linoulstic accounts of accent placement, and assumes a surface syntactic analysis of the input. It comprises a small number of heuristic rules for determining which phrases of a sentence are to be focussed upon; the exact location of a pitc...

This paper develops an online and freely available framework to aid teaching and learning the prosodic control of Tokyo Japanese: how to generate its adequate word accent and phrase intonation. This framework is called OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1] and it provides three features. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent ...

The topic of this paper is the variability of pitch realisation of phrase-initial accent I. In our study we have observed a difference in variability for the varieties investigated. Central Swedish pitch patterns for phrase-initial accent I both to the East (Stockholm) and to the West (Gothenburg) display an apparent constancy, albeit with distinct patterns: East Central Swedish rising and West...

COMPOSITIONAL approaches to mobile accentuation of the Indo-European type derive the accent of words from the lexically specified accentual features of their constituent morphemes, together with the BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE (BAP), which erases all accents but the leftmost one, and assigns an accent to the left edge of an unaccented domain.1 I propose here a compositional analysis in which B...

These structures are claimed to differ in terms of phrasing and accent pattern (with RDs being deaccented in contrast to ATs), but also in pitch range [6]. Here, we investigate the relation between these parameters in spontaneous corpus data. On the basis of observations from a previous reading experiment [5] (slightly deviating from the claims made in the literature), we hypothesize that RD co...