Experiments on accent type recognition and syntactic boundary detection of Japanese speech were conducted based on the statistical modeling of voice fundamental frequency contours formerly proposed by the authors. In the proposed modeling, fundamental frequency contours are segmented into moraic units to generate moraic contours, which are further represented by discrete codes. After modeling t...

This paper describes a prosodic method for segmenting continuous speech into accent phrases. Optimum sequences are obtained on the basis of least squared error criterion by using dynamic time warping between F0 contours of input speech and reference accent patterns called ‘pitch pattern templates’. But the optimum sequence does not always give good agreement with phrase boundaries labeled by ha...

This paper proposes a statistical phrase/accent model of voice fundamental frequency(F0) for speech synthesis. It presents an approach for automatic extraction and modeling of phrase and accent phenomena from F0 contours by taking into account their overall trends in the training data. An iterative optimization algorithm is described to extract these components, minimizing the reconstruction er...

The prosodic quality of a text-to-speech system is important for the intellegibility and perceived naturalness of synthetic speech. In earlier works the author developed a linguistically motivated model of German intonation based on the quantitative Fujisaki model of the production process of F0. The current paper compares results yielded by automatic Fujisaki modeling with a GToBI-style anotat...

Two speakers of Mexican Spanish read a total of 810 declarative sentences containing nine distinct target syllables with an H* accent , under dif ferent prosodic conditions (end of intonational phrase , end of intermediate phrase , and phrase-medial position) , systematically changing syllabic position in the word and distance in syllables to the next stressed syllable . The data demonstrate th...

This Event-Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates the use of prosodic information in the process of lexical access in French. In French, accentuation is said to be post-lexical, with a primary final accent (FA) and secondary initial accent (IA) marking the edges of the phrase. Results from previous studies, however, suggest IA may hold a demarcative function close to the level of the word....

This paper proposes an automatic prosodic labeling technique for constructing speech database used for speech synthesis. In the corpus-based Japanese speech synthesis, it is essential to use annotated speech data with prosodic information such as phrase boundaries and accent types. However, manual annotation is generally time-consuming and expensive. To overcome this problem, we propose an esti...

Previous studies indicated that the rightmost unit is the default position for bearing nuclear accent in multiple-focus condition in Standard Chinese. The present research investigated the accent realization for dual-focus sentences which has a leftmost nuclear accent. The syntactic form of [Subject Verb (Modifier1) Object1 (Modifier2) Object2] was adopted. A corrective focus was always assigne...

This paper introduces the 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] and it provides three functions. 1) Visual, auditory, systematic, and comprehensive illustration of patterns of accent change (accent sandhi) of verbs and adjectives. Here only the ...