Determining intonational boundaries from the acoustic signal

This article has two-fold aims: it reports firstly the improvement of a speech database in Catalan for speech synthesis (Festcat) with the information about prosodic boundaries using the break index labels proposed in the ToBI system; and secondly, it presents the experiments undergone to determine the acoustic markers that can differentiate among the break-indexes. Several experiments using different classification techniques were performed in order to compare the relative merit of different attributes to characterize breaks. Results show that the prosodic phrase breaks are correlated with: presence of a pause, lengthening of the pre-break syllable and the F0 contour of the span between the stressed syllable and the following post-stressed, if there are, immediately preceding the break.