A solution is proposed for rapidly adapting prosodic models to a new voice or a new application. First, a prosodic alphabet that is supported by linguistic knowledge is identified at the acoustic level. The observation of the realisation of prosodic events on the acoustic corpus allows classes of breaks, F0 shapes and accents to be constructed and automatic transcription rules to be written. Th...

Variation in pitch, amplitude and rhythm adds crucial paralinguistic information to human speech. Such prosodic cues can reveal information about the meaning or emphasis of a sentence or the emotional state of the speaker. To examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to prosodic cues is language independent and not human specific, we tested prosody perception in a controlled experiment with zebra...

the scanning probe microscopes (spms) based lithographic techniques have been demonstrated as an extremely capable patterning tool. manipulating surfaces, creating atomic assembly, fabricating chemical patterns, imaging topography and characterizing various mechanical properties of materials in nanometer regime are enabled by this technique. in this paper, a qualified overview of diverse lithog...

In this paper, we adopt a difference approach to prosody prediction for emotional text-to-speech synthesis, where the prosodic variations between emotional and neutral speech are decomposed into the global and local prosodic variations and predicted using a two-stage model. The global prosodic variations are modeled by the means and standard deviations of the prosodic parameters, while the loca...

The problem of F0 contour generation in Chinese are addressed in this paper. An F0 contour model based on templates of prosodic words is proposed. Taking templates of prosodic word F0 contour as the basic units, the basic structure of the model is established with references to the “small ripples on top of big waves theory” and “Fujisaki model”. A three-layer prosodic hierarchy which consists o...

This paper tries to discuss the interrelation between prosody and syntax by clarifying some syntactic constraints in Chinese prosodic segmentation and grouping. The main attention will be paid to search for (1) possible correlation between prosodic breaks and syntactic construction; (2) possible correlation between prosodic breaks and POS; and (3) the role of syntactic and lexical information i...

Cuttlefish are cephalopod molluscs that achieve dynamic camouflage by rapidly extracting visual information from the background and neurally implementing an appropriate skin (or body) pattern. We investigated how cuttlefish body patterning responses are influenced by contrast and spatial scale by varying the contrast and the size of checkerboard backgrounds. We found that: (1) at high contrast ...

The relation between prosodic constituents of different levels (the prosodic hierarchy) and the realization of phonemes is investigated in French and German broadcast speech. Four levels of prosodic categories are defined and the boundaries are automatically derived using syntactic chunking and forced alignment. We show that the higher a vowel position within the prosodic structure, the more st...

This paper shows how focus prosody of South Kyungsang Korean interacts with the prosodic structure of the dialect. Based on the prosodic structure defined by intonation, it is claimed that the domain of lexical pitch accent assignment is a Prosodic Word, but the prosodic domain of focus, or the realization of focus prominence, is an Accentual Phrase. This model can explain the phenomenon of mis...

A perception experiment was carried out to determine the perceived prosodic boundary strength and the hierarchies of the perceived prosodic boundaries for spontaneous Chinese. The results indicate that perceived prosodic boundaries are highly correlated between intelligible and unintelligible (delexical) utterances, showing that the listeners may judge prosodic boundaries with no reference to s...