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...

Cantonese is a well-known Chinese dialect with a quite complex tone system. We have applied the command-response model to represent F0 contours of Cantonese speech by defining a set of appropriate tone command patterns. In this paper, the analysis is extended to Cantonese utterances at three different speech rates. By incorporating the effects of tone coarticulation, word accentuation and phras...

This paper describes the principal features of the intonational system of Chickasaw, a Muskogean language spoken in southcentral Oklahoma. Results of the study are as follows. The Intonational Phrase (IP) consists of one or more Accentual Phrases (AP) which can be larger or smaller than a word. The underlying tonal pattern of the AP is [LHHL]. Chickasaw statements are characteristically marked ...

I will present an analysis of the intonation of the Banyumas dialect of Javanese (an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia), based on the autosegmental-metrical framework. As Javanese is a language without lexical stress, there are no pitch accents. Boundary tones are associated with the Accentual Phrase (AP). A non-final AP ends in a H% tone, while a nuclear AP ends in either a HL% or a LH...

Problem statement: In general, there are a number of rural dialects in Thai. However, four dialects are mainly spoken by Thai people residing in four core region including central, north, northeast and south regions. Recognizing and synthesizing Thai speech with different dialects are consequently difficult. Approach: Prosody is an important factor that must be taken into account, since the pro...

The current study examines the role of non-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. Seventy-two native Seoul Korean speakers participated in the word spotting experiments. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase initial than in phrase medial position, and that their error rates were significantly lower in rising tonal patterns than in non-rising p...

Problem statement: In spontaneous speech communication, prosody is an important factor that must be taken into account, since the prosody effects on not only the naturalness but also the intelligibility of speech. Focusing on synthesis of Thai expressive speech, a number of systems has been developed for years. However, the expressive speech with various speaking styles has not been accomplishe...

To establish Expressive Text-to-speech synthesis, current research studies both the processing of input text and the rendering of natural expressive speech. Focusing on the former as a front-end task in the production of synthetic speech, this paper investigates a novel feature for predicting phrase boundary tone labels which transcribe local fundamental frequency (F0) changes frequently appear...

A neural correlate for phrase boundary perception in music has recently been identified in musicians. It is called music closure positive shift ("music CPS") and has an equivalent in the perception of speech ("language CPS"). The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of musical expertise and different phrase boundary markers on the music CPS, using event-related brain potent...