Based on the previous studies on Chinese intonation and our own production data, we propose a model of Chinese intonation in which the surface f0 contours of a prosodic phrase (PP) can be modeled by the combined effects of focus stress and boundary tones. The observed patterns are based on the statistical analysis of the data. Experiment results indicate that narrowly focused syllables have a s...

The main body of our study derives from the processing of 5 subjects’ reading of a corpus from a Swedish novel. Two of the subjects were females. Intonation contours on a log frequency scale have been sampled and normalised to eliminate differences in mean tonal level and duration. As a result, intonation patterns across speakers are brought out revealing individual performances as well as grou...

This chapter examines how politeness in offers and requests is encoded by intonation in Catalan, a language which uses two distinct intonational pitch contours for unbiased yes-no questions. Fifteen Central Catalan speakers participated in a Discourse Completion Task that elicited offers and requests in scenarios controlled for level of social distance, power, and cost of the action. The data w...

This investigation focuses on the development of intonation patterns in four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanish-speaking children between 0 ; 11 and 2 ; 4. Pitch contours were prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances, for a total of 6558 utterances. The pragmatic meaning and communicative function were also assessed. Three main conclu...

Prosody evaluation is an essential part of computer-aided language learning system. In the paper, prosodic variability among inter-speakers is investigated based on a database containing eight repetitions of 200 sentences. For Mandarin of reading style, its variability can be analyzed from rhythm, intonation and tone. Experimental results show that the mean correlation of tone between inter-spe...

We present a system for the classification of intonation patterns in human robot interaction. The system distinguishes questions from other types of utterances and can deal with additional reverberations, background noise, as well as music interfering with the speech signal. The main building blocks of our system are a multi channel source separation, robust fundamental frequency extraction and...

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their yes/no questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five- to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the basis of intonation alone. Children eight years of age or you...

This paper argues for a new way of thinking about semantic and pragmatic effects of particular sentence intonation patterns. The main focus of the paper is on the so-called rising declaratives, i.e. sentences that have the surface structure of a declarative sentence but are pronounced with a rising pitch contour. Rising declaratives differ from both declaratives with a falling pitch contour and...

Intonation is one of the most important components of human spoken communication. Therefore, a correct prosody in a text-to-speech system contributes to a better quality in terms of intelligibility, naturalness and pleasantness. In order to achieve it, we need to obtain paralinguistic information from other information sources to complement the information in the text because natural language u...

Much is already known about the prosodic systems of the indigenous South African languages from descriptions and analyses in the existing literature. All of the existing work has been carried out in the field of African studies or formal linguistics. In order to be able to implement the generalisations obtained into computational models in speech processing, the existing sources and results mus...