This paper describes experiments concerning the prediction of a good intonation for the synthesis of structured documents. The paper extends our previous research in four important aspects: (i) models are trained and evaluated on read text material (no isolated sentences), (ii) the intonation model is evaluated while fully integrated in the entire prosody model chain, (iii) the feature selectio...

In this paper, a correlation between the linguistic structure of the written text and the real intonation behavior of the read speech in European Portuguese language (EP) is presented. It is our belief that intonation behavior in EP can be strongly predicted from two main coordinates: the syntactic structure of the sentence and its pragmatic communicative function, in one way, combined with the...

This paper presents our research in preparation to compile a Lithuanian intonation corpus. The main objective of this research was to discover characteristic patterns of Lithuanian intonation through clustering of pitch contours of intermediate intonation phrases. The paper covers the set of procedures that were used to extend an ordinary speech corpus to make it suitable for intonation analysi...

Modeling intonation, i.e., specifying adequate fundamental frequency (F0) contours, remains a challenging task for speech synthesis systems. This paper discusses the development of a system for phonetically specifying intonation contours for German. It deals with the problem of translating an abstract phonological representation of intonation namely the tone-sequence model into a concrete phone...

Conflicting data from neurobehavioral studies of the perception of intonation (linguistic) and emotion (affective) in spoken language highlight the need to further examine how functional attributes of prosodic stimuli are related to hemispheric differences in processing capacity. Because of similarities in their acoustic profiles, intonation and emotion permit us to assess to what extent hemisp...

Vowel hyperarticulation in infant-directed speech (IDS) has been found consistently across both tone (Mandarin [1]) and non-tone (Russian, Swedish, American [2] and Australian English [3]) languages and has been posited as a possible bootstrapping mechanism for early language development in infancy [1]. Here we investigated (1) IDS in Cantonese to examine whether tones, like vowels, are hyperar...

Yu-Fang Wang Graduate Institute of English , National Taiwan Normal University Abstract In conversation, adverbial clause subordination is most commonly achieved through temporal, conditional, concessive, and causal conjunctions, such as dang (` when'), ruguoCin, suiran (`although'), yinwei (` because'), etc. in Mandarin Chinese. This study aims at exploring adverbial clauses in spoken Mandarin...

This paper summarises recent research concerning the relationship between intonation and the syntactic analysis of sentences. After introductory comments on the nature of intonation, we discuss methodological problems in determining the relationship between syntactic and intonational structure, and the potential dangers of basing claims about this relationship on scripted readings rather than o...