This paper proposes an approach to automatically evaluate the prosody of Chinese Mandarin speech for language learning. In this approach, we grade the appropriateness of prosody of speech units according to a model speech corpus from a teacher’s voice. To this end, we build two models, which are the prosody model and the scoring model. The prosody model that is built from the teacher’s speech p...

The current study had two main goals: First, to replicate the ‘bimodal integration’ effect (i.e. automatic integration of crossmodal stimuli, namely facial emotions and emotional prosody); second, investigate whether this phenomenon facilitates or impairs intake retention unattended verbal content. borrowed from previous bimodal designs included a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task, wher...

Prosody is an important feature of language, comprising intonation, loudness, and tempo. Emotional prosodic processing forms an integral part of our social interactions. The main aim of this study was to use bold contrast fMRI to clarify the normal functional neuroanatomy of emotional prosody, in passive and active contexts. Subjects performed six separate scanning studies, within which two dif...

Does prosody help word recognition? Humans listening to natural prosody, as opposed to monotone or foreign prosody, are able to understand the content with lower cognitive load and higher accuracy [1]. For automatic Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR), the answer is not that straightforward. Even though successful word recognition and successful prosody recognition have been ...

In this paper, these problems of how to model and train Mandarin prosody dependent acoustic model and how to decode input speech based on prosody dependent speech recognition system will be discussed. We use automatic prosody labeling methods to annotate syllable prosodic break type and stress type on continuous speech corpus, and utilize our proposed methods to train prosody dependent tonal sy...

This paper presents a novel approach that improves the robustness of prosody dependent language modeling by leveraging the dependence between prosody and syntax. A prosody dependent language model describes the joint probability distribution of concurrent word and prosody sequences and can be used to provide prior language constraints in a prosody dependent speech recognizer. Robust Maximum Lik...

This paper presents a prosody generation method for Chinese mandarin using the template of quantified prosodic unit and base intonation contour. This method uses the prosodic feature picked-up from the syllables in the prosody words by rule as the base unit, and integrates the prosody rules in the prosody words of Chinese mandarin and base intonation contour to achieve the prosody contours with...

Prosody generation is an important issue in text to speech system. We present in this paper an example-based approach for prosody generation in mandarin Chinese speech synthesis. The general idea is that we are trying to get the prosodic information from real speech examples. We first analyze given Chinese text, and form a linguistic feature vector, which describes the phonetic and lexicon char...