Fine Phonetic Detail and Intonational Meaning

ProSynth: an integrated prosodic approach to speech synthesis

This paper outlines ProSynth, an approach to speech synthesis which takes a rich linguistic structure as central to the generation of natural-sounding speech. We start from the assumption that the acoustic richness of the speech signal reflects linguistic structural richness and underlies the percept of naturalness. Naturalness achieved by paying attention to systematic phonetic detail in the s...

Intonational variation and social meaning: Categorical and phonetic aspects

Intonation and Interpretation: Phonetics and Phonology

Intonational meaning is located in two components of language, the phonetic implementation and the intonational grammar. The phonetic implementation is widely used for the expression of universal meanings that derive from ‘biological codes’, meaning dimensions based on aspects of the production process of pitch variation. Three codes are identified, Ohala’s Frequency Code, the Effort Code and t...

Contribution of fine phonetic detai

This paper first summarizes some phonetic observations that challenge theories of speech perception and speech understanding which assume the speech signal is converted to an abstract form, such as features or phonemes, before it can be understood, and that ‘knowledge-driven’ processes are largely ‘top down’ rather than signal-driven. Systematic variation in fine phonetic detail is shown to ind...

Intonation as a Constraint on Inferential Processing

The proper role of intonation in utterance interpretation should be assessed in terms of the way that intonation interacts with other linguistic phenomena, notably with syntactic form and with grammatically encoded meaning, whether conceptual meaning of a compositional nature or procedural meaning that constrains the way in which an addressee will perform deductive inferences over conceptual re...