Purpose: Prosody is the variation of dynamics, frequency, rate, and tone that carries contextual meaning in speech. The purpose of this study is to present an overview of prosody in speech from evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives, and to review implications in therapy for voice disorders. Methods: Cross-disciplinary overview. Results: Applications of prosody from linguistics, ...

In computerized technology, artificial speech is becoming increasingly important, and is already used in ATMs, online gaming and healthcare contexts. However, today's artificial speech typically sounds monotonous, a main reason for this being the lack of meaningful prosody. One particularly important function of prosody is to convey different emotions. This is because successful encoding and de...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the hemispheric contributions to prosody recognitions and interference effects of semantic processing on prosody for stroke patients by using the Korean language. METHODS Ten right hemisphere damaged patients (RHD), nine left hemisphere damaged patients (LHD), and eleven healthy controls (HC) participated. In pure prosody recognition task, four semantically neutral se...

End-to-end text-to-speech synthesis systems achieved immense success in recent times, with improved naturalness and intelligibility. However, the end-to-end models, which primarily depend on attention-based alignment, do not offer an explicit provision to modify/incorporate desired prosody while synthesizing speech. Moreover, state-of-the-art use autoregressive models for synthesis, making pred...

A new model-based automatic prosody labeling method for Mandarin speech is proposed. It first introduces four models to describe the relationships of the prosody tags to be labeled, the prosodic features of the speech signals, and the linguistic features of the associated texts. It then employs a sequential optimization procedure to estimate parameters of these four models and find all prosody ...

Corpus-driven speech synthesis is hampered by the occurrence of occasional glitches which ruin the impression of the whole utterance. We propose an iterative unit selection integrated with an unnatural prosody detection model to identify any unnatural prosody. The system searches an optimal path in the lattice, verifies its naturalness by the unnatural prosody model and replaces the bad section...

Our research group has postulated a perceptually based multiphrase prosody framework for speech paragraphs in fluent speech using corporal analyses. The framework features a prosody hierarchy that organizes phrases and sentences into prosodic groups (PG) in connected speech, and specifies cross-phrase prosodic relationships in the acoustic domains [1, 2]. A corresponding fluent speech prosody m...

The first aim of this study was to determine if there was a significant perceptual asymmetry for syntactic prosody and if it differed from the perceptual asymmetry for emotional prosody. The second aim of this study was to determine if the observed asymmetries were the product of task demands or stimulus features. Experiment 1 consisted of a Syntactic task and an Emotional task. In the Syntacti...

The relationship between wh prosody and wh scope in Tokyo Japanese has been both empirically and theoretically controversial. This paper examines the production and perception of wh prosody in the Fukuoka dialect. Results confirm that the characteristic wh prosodic contour and the relationship between wh prosody and wh scope identified in earlier impressionistic and small-scale empirical studie...

Speech prosody, just like the segmental aspect of speech, conveys communicative meanings by encoding functional contrasts. The contrasts are realized through articulation, a biomechanical process with specific constraints. Prosodic phonology or any other theory of prosody therefore cannot be autonomous from either communicative functions or biophysical mechanisms. Successful modeling of speech ...