This study investigated the use of pitch in pet-directed speech (PDS) when the size of the pet differs. Two Cantonesespeaking owners were recruited to talk with three dogs with different sizes. Results demonstrated that pitch level and dog size were inversely related, i.e., a higher pitch was used with a smaller dog, and vice versa. Other factors may also influence the pitch level of PDS, like ...

In this paper, we discuss a methodology for automatic prosodic modeling in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. The proposed methodology can be seen as a data-driven strategy to train prosodic rules from the automatic analysis of a specific text and its related speech material. Therefore, our corpus-based training procedure is based on an automatic linguistic analysis of the text and on an acoustic an...

Interlocutors are known to mutually adapt during conversation. Recent studies have questioned the adaptation of phonological representations and kinematics of phonetic variables such as loudness, speech rate or fundamental frequency. Results are often contradictory and the effectiveness of phonetic convergence during conversation is still an open issue. This paper describes an original experime...

The issue of representing speech rhythm is understood in this paper as the search for relevant primary parameters that will allow the formalisation of speech rhythm. Current speech synthesisers show that phonological models are not satisfactory with respect to the modelling of speech rhythmicity. Our analysis indicates that this may be in part related to the formalisation of rhythmic representa...

This paper describes the results of a joint study on the applicability of the command-response model to F0 contours of European Portuguese, with an aim to use it in a TTS system. Analysis-by-Synthesis of observed F0 contours of a number of utterances by five native speakers indicated that the model with provisions for both positive and negative accent commands applies quite well to all the utte...

Proper early acquisition of speech and language appears to be a necessary process to reach mature speech communication. In modelling the process of natural (and pathological) speech production and speech perception, we frequently concentrate on specific aspects of phonetic knowledge. But also to improve the performance of speech technological systems, an intelligent interpretation of the abunda...

This paper describes the processing of 2465 sentences (or utterences) which are collected by phonetical rules from a big corpus--recent years' newspaper, "People's Daily" and etc., as materials of speech recognition and speech synthesis database. In these sentences, both phonetic phenomena and sentence patterns are included. We first consider the phonetic distribution among syllables: inter-syl...

1 Background .................................................................................................................................1 1 Visible speech synthesis .........................................................................................................2 2 Illustrative experiment of evaluation testing ..........................................................................