The naturalness of synthetic speech depends strongly on the prediction of appropriate prosody. For the present study the original annotation of the German speech database “Kiel Corpus of Read Speech” was extended automatically with syntactic features, word frequency, and syllable boundaries. Several classification and regression trees for predicting symbolic prosody features, postlexical phonol...

This descriptive, longitudinal study involved the analysis of the prosody and voice characteristics of conversational speech produced by six young children with severe to profound hearing impairments who had been fitted with cochlear implants. A total of 40 samples were analyzed using the Prosody-Voice Screening Profile (PVSP; Shriberg, L. D., Kwiatkowski, J., & Rasmussen, C. (1990). Prosody-Vo...

In this paper, we present a Message-toSpeech (MTS) system that offers the linguistic flexibility desired for spoken dialogue and message generating systems. The use of prosody transplantation and special purpose prosody models results in highly natural prosody for the synthesised speech.

Learning prosodic control for speaking Japanese is effective to reduce syntactic and lexical ambiguity and to improve the comprehensibility of learners’ spoken Japanese. Good prosody can also improve its naturalness. In the conventional curriculum however, prosody training has not been provided satisfactorily for learners partly because of scarcity of teaching materials. To facilitate prosody t...

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 rev...

This paper investigates the addition of prosody to a synthetic speech presentation of algebra notation in an algebra workstation for blind people. Prosody and lexical cues were evaluated in terms of their impact on disambiguating an utterance, enhancement of the retention of content and its contribution to mental workload. Prosodic cues alone performed better than the more traditional lexical c...

Prosody plays an important role in the process of verbal communication, complementing and emphasising the linguistic and emotional aspects of language. Disturbances of speech prosody are rarely recognised, although aprosodia occurs frequently in patients with schizophrenia. Prosodic disturbance of speech can significantly impair verbal communication and social functioning of patients with schiz...

The model of prosody used for French TTS in the Aculab TTS system is unusual in several respects. Firstly, it is based firmly on current metrical theories of French prosody. Secondly, it is entirely knowledge-based: there are no stochastic components in the model. Thirdly, it makes use of a pseudo-random element to avoid the predictability of synthetic prosody. Fourthly, it is designed to facil...

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit or responses. This is the case for that predominantly occur alongside (or negative) natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity evaluated isolation, such semantically prosodic activate evaluative associations of their usual company, which color judgmen...

In this paper we describe how prosody prediction can be efficiently integrated with the unit selection process in a concatenative speech synthesizer under a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) architecture. WFSTs representing prosody prediction and unit selection can be composed during synthesis, thus effectively expanding the space of possible prosodic targets. We implemented a symbolic pr...