• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제28권2E호
• /
• pp.43-50
• /
• 2009

To get more natural synthetic speech generated by a Korean TTS (Text-To-Speech) system, we have to know all the possible prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. We should find out these rules from linguistic, phonetic information or from real speech. In general, all of these rules should be integrated into a prosody-generation algorithm in a TTS system. But this algorithm cannot cover up all the possible prosodic rules in a language and it is not perfect, so the naturalness of synthesized speech cannot be as good as we expect. ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) can be trained to learn the prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. To train and test ANNs, we need to prepare the prosodic patterns of all the phonemic segments in a prosodic corpus. A prosodic corpus will include meaningful sentences to represent all the possible prosodic rules. Sentences in the corpus were made by picking up a series of words from the list of PB (phonetically Balanced) isolated words. These sentences in the corpus were read by speakers, recorded, and collected as a speech database. By analyzing recorded real speech, we can extract prosodic pattern about each phoneme, and assign them as target and test patterns for ANNs. ANNs can learn the prosody from natural speech and generate prosodic patterns of the central phonemic segment in phoneme strings as output response of ANNs when phoneme strings of a sentence are given to ANNs as input stimuli.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제5권1호
• /
• pp.99-108
• /
• 2013

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. In particular, effects of prosodic context on duration and intensity of syllables and words have been widely reported. Drawing on prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study attempted to examine whether and how prosodic prominence and phrase boundary of everyday conversational speech, as determined by a large group of ordinary listeners, are related to the phonetic realization of duration and intensity. The results showed that the patterns of word durations and intensities are influenced by prosodic structure. Closer examinations revealed, however, that the effects of prosodic prominence are not the same as those of prosodic phrase boundary. With regard to intensity measures, the results revealed the systematic changes in the patterns of overall RMS intensity near prosodic phrase boundary but the prominence effects are restricted to the nucleus. In terms of duration measures, both prosodic prominence and phrase boundary are the most closely related to the lengthening of the nucleus. Yet, prosodic prominence is more closely related to the lengthening of the onset while phrase boundary lengthens the coda duration more. The findings from the current study suggest that the phonetic realizations of prosodic prominence are different from those of prosodic phrase boundary, and speakers signal different prosodic structures through deliberate modulations of the internal phonetic structure of words and listeners attend to such phonetic variations.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제18권4E호
• /
• pp.26-30
• /
• 1999

This paper introduces a prosodic phrasing method in Korean to improve the naturalness of speech synthesis, especially in text-to-speech conversion. In prosodic phrasing, it is necessary to understand the structure of a sentence through a language processing procedure, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging and parsing, since syntactic structure correlates better with the prosodic structure of speech than with other factors. In this paper, the prosodic phrasing procedure is treated from two perspectives: dependency parsing and prosodic phrasing using dependency relations. This is appropriate for Ural-Altaic, since a prosodic boundary in speech usually concurs with a governor of dependency relation. From experimental results, using the proposed method achieved 12% improvement in prosody boundary prediction accuracy with a speech corpus consisting 300 sentences uttered by 3 speakers.

• 한국어학
• /
• 제65권
• /
• pp.211-236
• /
• 2014

The aim of this study is to investigate categorical characteristics of 'mak' and their discourse functions through analyzed the prosodic features of 'mak'. The previous studies of 'mak' focused on grammatical or semantic characteristics, but this study focuses on the prosodic features of 'mak' based on speech data. As a result, adverb 'mak' and discourse marker 'mak' are distinguished from prosodic boundary, duration, pause and sort of number tonal patterns. Functions of discourse marker 'mak' is as follows: Maintenance of utterance, Attention, Delay, Expression negative manner. These functions have salient prosodic features related to their functions. Consequently prosodic features are important to analyze categorical characteristics and to establish functions of 'mak'.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제8권2호
• /
• pp.165-180
• /
• 2001

In this paper prosodic characteristics of French language are analysed with a corpus of radio interview. Intonation patterns are interpreted in terms of raising pattern, focal raising pattern and falling pattern. Accentual prominence is classified in two types, rhythmic accent and focal accent. Focal accent permit to explain the cohesion in a utterance or between two utterances. As a prosodic variable of discourse pauses are described by their form of realization (filled pause, silent pause, hesitation etc), their distribution and their function in utterance.

• 아시아태평양코퍼스연구
• /
• 제2권1호
• /
• pp.13-22
• /
• 2021

The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses with a specially designed computer software SpeechActConc to examine speech acts in business communication. The naturally occurring data from the audio recordings and the prosodic transcriptions of the business sub-corpora of the HKCSE (prosodic) are manually annotated with a speech act taxonomy for finding out the frequency of fillers, the co-occurring patterns of fillers with other speech acts, and the linguistic realisations of fillers. The discoursal function of fillers to sustain the discourse or to hold the floor has diverse linguistic realisations, ranging from a sound (e.g. 'uhuh') and a word (e.g. 'well') to sounds (e.g. 'um er') and words, namely phrase ('sort of') and clause (e.g. 'you know'). Some are even combinations of sound(s) and word(s) (e.g. 'and um', 'yes er um', 'sort of erm'). Among the top five frequent linguistic realisations of fillers, 'er' and 'um' are the most common ones found in all the six genres with relatively higher percentages of occurrence. The remaining more frequent realisations consist of clause ('you know'), word ('yeah') and sound ('erm'). These common forms are syntactically simpler than the less frequent realisations found in the genres. The co-occurring patterns of fillers and other speech acts are diverse. The more common co-occurring speech acts with fillers include informing and answering. The findings show that fillers are not only frequently used by speakers in spontaneous conversation but also mostly represented in sounds or non-linguistic realisations.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제3권3호
• /
• pp.19-26
• /
• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제14권2호
• /
• pp.39-54
• /
• 2022

본 연구의 목적은 L2KSC(외국어로서의 한국어 음성 말뭉치)의 한국어 부분에서 한국어 낭독과 자유 발화를 분석하여 음성 유형의 운율 차이를 명확히 하는 것이다. 이를 위해 문장의 조음 길이, 조음 속도, 한 문장 내 휴지 길이 및 휴지 빈도, 문장 F0값을 변수로 설정하고 통계적 방법론(t-검정, 상관 분석, 회귀 분석)을 통해 분석하였다. 실험결과, 낭독과 자유 발화는 각 문장을 구성하는 운율구 형태가 구조적으로 달랐는데 각 발화 유형을 구별하는 운율적 요소로는 조음 길이, 휴지 길이, 휴지 빈도로 나타났다. 통계적 결과에서는 낭독 발화는 조음 속도와 조음 길이의 상관관계가 가장 높았는데, 이는 주어진 문장이 길수록 화자가 더 빨리 말하는 것을 설명하였다. 그러나 자유 발화에서는 문장의 조음 길이와 휴지 빈도 사이의 관계가 높았다. 전반적으로 자유 발화에서는 문장을 만들기 위해 짧은 억양구가 지속적으로 만들어지는데, 그런 이유로 더 많은 휴지가 발생하여 문장이 더 길어지는 것으로 나타났다.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국음향학회 2002년도 하계학술발표대회 논문집 제21권 1호
• /
• pp.15-18
• /
• 2002

Prosodic features of speech are known to play an important role in the transmission of linguistic information in human conversation. Their roles in the transmission of para- and non- linguistic information are even much more. In spite of their importance in human conversation, from engineering viewpoint, research focuses are mainly placed on segmental features, and not so much on prosodic features. With the aim of promoting research works on prosody, a research project 'Prosody and Speech Processing' is now going on. A rough sketch of the project is first given in the paper. Then, the paper introduces several prosody-related research works, which are going on in our laboratory. They include, corpus-based fundamental frequency contour generation, speech rate control for dialogue-like speech synthesis, analysis of prosodic features of emotional speech, reply speech generation in spoken dialogue systems, and language modeling with prosodic boundaries.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
• /
• 제46호
• /
• pp.127-143
• /
• 2003

This paper presents segmental labeling conventions proposed by SiTEC (Speech Information Technology Engineering Center) 2002 and proposes a new directions of a revision for a simpler version. The paper also reviews one of the prosody labelling conventions for Korean, K-ToBI convention(ver. 3.1) and proposes a couple of modifications and suggestions.