Articulatory-functional modeling of speech prosody: a review

Natural prosody is produced by an articulatory system to convey communicative meanings. It is therefore desirable for prosody modeling to represent both articulatory mechanisms and communicative functions. There are doubts, however, as to whether such representation is necessary or beneficial if the aim of modeling is to just generate perceptually acceptable output. In this paper we briefly review models that have attempted to implement representations of either or both aspects of prosody. We show that, at least theoretically, it is beneficial to represent both articulatory mechanisms and communicative functions even if the goal is to just simulate surface prosody.