Prosody evaluation is an essential part of computer-aided language learning system. In the paper, we investigate an automatic prosody evaluation method for Mandarin speech. The method is based on prosody comparison between the tested and standard utterance. The prosodic similarities are calculated from three aspects: tone, intonation and rhythm. Based on these similarities, a ranking algorithm ...

Storytelling is a distinct speaking style which embraces various expressive subtleties aimed to draw the attention of the children. Studies have shown that Text-to-speech (TTS) systems have the tendency of not conveying the right emotion expressivity in their speech outputs. The objective of this work is to develop prosody models to capture the story semantics present in the Hindi children stor...

Our reasearch goal is to construct a Japanese TTS (Text-to-Speech) system that can output various kinds of prosody. Since such synthetic speech is useful for a practical use, many TTS systems have implemented global prosodic control processing. But fundamentally they're designed to output speech with standard pitch and speech rate. We discuss synthesis method for high quality speech with extrem...

In this paper we show how prosody can be used in spoken dialog systems. First, we describe the phenomena that prosodic analysis is concerned with and give examples why prosody is relevant in the context of spoken dialog processing. Then we examine prosody in the light of pattern classification. We show how prosodic events can be categorized. We detail how those prosodic events manifest themselv...

The prosody of an utterance can be varied by changing F0, duration and amplitude. Such changes are typically accompanied by variation in the talker’s face/head motion (visual prosody). For native language utterances, people can match auditory and visual prosody accurately. We tested whether English perceivers can do this with an unfamiliar language, Cantonese, which differs from English specifi...

The prediction of prosody from text information has long been recognised as a requirement for natural sounding speech synthesis. While an examination of the relationship between text information and prosody typically focuses on the role of accent, duration and phrasing both from a statistical and rulebased perspective, this paper investigates the correlation between the similarities calculated ...

The paper proposes a prosody generation method for dialog speech synthesis in Mandarin. The method is an extension of a prosody model for read speech and also takes the essential characteristic of dialog speech into account. Besides the faster speaking rate and narrower pitch range in dialog speech, our method concentrates on the more underlying and essential characteristic: the incompletion of...

People with autism are perceived to have ‘odd’ prosody, but is it malfunctioning? A new prosody test assesses the functionality of prosody in four aspects of speech (phrasing, affect, turn-end and focus) by tasks that elicit utterances in which prosody alone conveys the meaning. The test was used with 100 typically-developing children (TD), 39 with Asperger's syndrome (AspS) and 31 with high-fu...

The present study investigated the ERP correlates of the integration of emotional prosody to the emotional meaning of a spoken word. Thirty-four nonclinical participants listened to negative and positive words that were spoken with an angry or happy prosody and classified the emotional valence of the word meaning while ignoring emotional prosody. Social anhedonia was also self-rated by the subj...

This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on ...