• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.17-28
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• 2005

This paper argues that news speech entails a distinct intonational pattern from natural speech, effectively reflecting that it primarily focuses on providing new information. We conducted a phonetic experiment to compare the tonal contours between news speech and natural speech, examining the distributions of pitch accents and the overall pitch ranges. We utilized 70 American Press (AP) radio news utterances and 70 natural utterances extracted from TV dramas. Results show that news speech involves 3.38 H*'s (including L+H* and !H*) within an intonational phrase (IP) or intermediate phrase (ip) whereas natural speech, 1.8 in average. The number of IP/ip's per sentence is 3 in news speech, which is shown in the highest rate of 32.07% of the news speech, but it is merely 1, taking up the highest 41.42% in natural speech. Next, declination tends to be prevented in news speech, and the pitch range is much greater in news speech than in natural speech. Finally, a secondary stress syllable is comparatively frequently given a pitch accent in news speech, explicitly distinct from natural speech. These results can be interpreted as stating that news has the particular purpose of providing new information; every content word tends to be given a H* or its related pitch accent like L+H* or !H* because news speech assumes that every word conveys new information. This definitely brings about more IP/ip's per sentence due to a human physiological constraint; that is, more H*'s will cause more respiratory breaks. Also, greater pitch ranges and pitch accents imposed on secondary stress may be attributed to exaggerating new information.

• MALSORI
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• no.62
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• pp.69-84
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• 2007

Japanese is a language having intonations, which are indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the accentual phrases (APs) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI, which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method which can enhance the quality of synthesized speech by reducing the errors in predicting break indices (BI), are proposed. The method is to use a new definition for the phonetic symbols, which combine the phonetic values of Japanese words with the accents information. Since a stream of defined phonetic symbols includes the information on the changes in intonations, the BI can be easily predicted by dividing the intonation phrase (IP) into several APs. As a result of an experiment, the accuracy of break generations was 98 % and the proposed method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.405-414
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• 2007

This paper describes a preliminary work on prosody modeling aspect of a text-to-speech system for Thai. Specifically, the model is designed to predict symbolic markers from text (i.e., prosodic phrase boundaries, accent, and intonation boundaries), and then using these markers to generate pitch, intensity, and durational patterns for the synthesis module of the system. In this paper, a novel method for annotating the prosodic structure of Thai sentences based on dependency representation of syntax is presented. The goal of the annotation process is to predict from text the rhythm of the input sentence when spoken according to its intended meaning. The encoding of the prosodic structure is established by minimizing speech disrhythmy while maintaining the congruency with syntax. That is, each word in the sentence is assigned a prosodic feature called strength dynamic which is based on the dependency representation of syntax. The strength dynamics assigned are then used to obtain rhythmic groupings in terms of a phonological unit called foot. Finally, the foot structure is used to predict the durational pattern of the input sentence. The aforementioned process has been tested on a set of ambiguous sentences, which represents various structural ambiguities involving five types of compounds in Thai.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2023

This study investigated the response time and patterns of categorical perception of the wh-scope of an embedded clause with the non-bridge verb, "gung-geum hada 'wonder'," in the matrix verb phrase in Gyeongsang Korean. Using the same procedure as Yun (2022), 72 responses and response times for each stimulus were collected from 24 participants over the course of three trials. The stimuli were recorded readings of 40 speakers (20 male, 20 female). Context was provided to induce a matrix scope interpretation of the embedded wh-phrase in the target sentence. We sorted the 40 stimuli according to the number of matrix scope responses each received, and charted the response times for each stimulus. Although there was considerable overlap for the different types of wh-scope interpretations, there was a clear difference in categorical perception between the matrix and embedded scopes. The 24 participants also differed in their categorical perceptions. The results suggested that response time and wh-scope interpretation were not directly related and that two main weighted factors affected wh-scope interpretation: morpho-syntactic constraints and prosodic structural integrity. The weighting of each of these factors was inversely correlated and varied among subjects.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3992-3998
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• 2013

This paper is related to the method of adding a emotional speech corpus to a high-quality large corpus based speech synthesizer, and generating various synthesized speech. We made the emotional speech corpus as a form which can be used in waveform concatenated speech synthesizer, and have implemented the speech synthesizer that can be generated various synthesized speech through the same synthetic unit selection process of normal speech synthesizer. We used a markup language for emotional input text. Emotional speech is generated when the input text is matched as much as the length of intonation phrase in emotional speech corpus, but in the other case normal speech is generated. The BIs(Break Index) of emotional speech is more irregular than normal speech. Therefore, it becomes difficult to use the BIs generated in a synthesizer as it is. In order to solve this problem we applied the Variable Break[3] modeling. We used the Japanese speech synthesizer for experiment. As a result we obtained the natural emotional synthesized speech using the break prediction module for normal speech synthesize.