This paper proposes a three-tier prosodic hierarchy, including prosodic word, intermediate phrase and intonational phrase tiers, for Mandarin that emphasizes the use of the prosodic word instead of the lexical word as the basic prosodic unit. Both the surface difference and perceptual difference show that this is helpful for achieving high naturalness in text-to-speech conversion. Three approac...

Two transcribers have labeled prosodic events independently on a subset of Switchboard corpus using adapted ToBI (TOnes and Break Indices) system. Transcriptions of two types of pitch accents (H* and L*), phrasal accents (Hand L-) and boundary tones (H% and L%) encoded independently by two transcribers are compared for intertranscriber reliability. Two commonly used methods of reliability measu...

The acoustic-phonetic properties of words spoken with three different levels of accentuation (de-accented, pre-nuclear and nuclear accented in broad-focus and nuclear accented in narrow-focus) are examined in question-answer elicited sentences and iterative imitations (on the syllable da) produced by six French and six German speakers. Normalised parameter values allow a comparative weighting o...

Two experiments examine the perceptual consequences of systematic differences between Bulgarian and German in the production of phrasal prominence. In experiment one, five versions of a German sentence differing in focus, and therefore in the degree of prominence of two critical words implicated in the focus conditions, were presented in pairs to Bulgarian and German subjects who judged the deg...

Verb-particle constructions (phrasal verbs) are a notoriously difficult aspect of English to acquire for second-language (L2) learners. This study was conducted to assess whether L2 English speakers would show sensitivity to the subtle semantic properties of these constructions, namely the gradations in semantic transparency of different verb-particle constructions (e.g., finish up vs. chew out...

One major feature of the prosody of Mandarin Chinese speech flow is prosodic phrase grouping [1, 2, and 3]. Phrasal and sentential intonations are governed by a prosody framework that structurally group phrases into a larger/longer and identifiable unit. An overall prosody pattern of such phrase grouping with prosodic specifications is superimposed on phrase group. In turn, individual phrasal i...