• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.137-150
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• 2004

This paper investigates the prosodic characteristics of discourse boundaries in spontaneous conversation. In this study, the term 'conversation' is taken to refer to a kind of talk in which two or more participants alternate in speaking about particular topics. Such a definition implies that there are at least two sorts of structures in the conversation: textual structure and interactive structure. This requires us to consider not just the textual influences on prosody but also the impact of interactive context. The aim of this study is to find out the acoustic-prosodic means used by speakers to signal discourse boundaries in conversational interaction. The results show that the conflict between the structural level and the interactive level obliges the speakers to reorganize the prosodic variables according to the type of discourse boundaries.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.55-65
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• 2012

In this study, the prosodic disambiguation of the syntactic attachment differences was investigated in relation to the effect of lexical bias. Speech materials were composed of N1-conj-N2-PP phrases such as "walkers and runners with dogs." The results show that the use of durational pattern is dominant over the pitch pattern to differentiate the attachment differences. The characteristic pitch contour was the rise and fall over N1 and N2 in the high attachment. The pitch contour in the low attachment was the rise and fall over N2 and N3 although the frequency of such patterns was lower for the low attachment case. For the durational pattern, the lengthening in the N2 region plays a significant role in the disambiguation of the syntactic attachments. The interaction between the lexical bias and the syntactic attachment was not statistically significant in the duration data.

• MALSORI
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• no.31_32
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• pp.207-221
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• 1996

The aim of this research is to study the functioning of the peak variations at the end of the rhythmic groups in spoken french. For this purpose, the text '60 Voix, 60 Exercices', published by Hachette in 1988, was selected. This textbook is based on interviews with 60 persons who briefly speak in a monolog from on a subject of their choice. 500 hundred different groups were selected and submitted to the auditory judgment of six informants, three French natives and three Japanese natives who had studied French for at least three years. It was found, first, that there exists a tendency to a change of either rising or tolling intonation compared with the flat one, and second, that the rising intonation obtains a flirty good score of frequency compared with the two other, ones even if the examined sentences do not pertain to the strict classical types of interrogative or exclamative sentences or dialogs, where affectivity is so often an important factor.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.23-42
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• 2006

This paper reports a preliminary result of an acoustic study on the stress and intonational system in Lakhota, a native American language. It investigates how the stress and intonation in Lakhota are phonetically manifested; and how the stress interacts with other prosodic factors. The results preliminarily obtained from one native Lakhota speaker suggest that the primary cue of the stress is relatively high F0 which is often accompanied by higher intensity (for the vowel) and longer VOT (for aspirated stops). The results also indicate that stress is not reliably marked by duration. The stress system, however, interacts with the intonational pattern, such that, for example, intonational peak falls on the stressed syllable with a general pattern of L+H* and that it interacts with the boundary tone L%, resulting in mid tone utterance-finally. This paper can be viewed largely as a qualitative study on an understudied native American language, Lakhota and as forming a basis for further development of its stress and intonation system whose acoustic properties of its prosodic system have not been investigated before.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.29-37
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• 2009

This paper presents results from speech production experiments on English, Korean, and Hindi that compare variation in the acoustic expression of dissimilar phonological laryngeal contrast in stops conditioned by prosodic prominence. Target stops are analyzed from utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions, with a variation in contrastive focal accent, from the speech data by six male American English speakers, five male Seoul Korean speakers, and five male Delhi Hindi speakers. The results show that prosodic prominence conditions enhanced distinctiveness between contrastive segments in the three languages. The manner in which prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase structure is marked at the level of segmental variation is, however, found to be language-specific to some extent. In addition, a correlation between the size of the phonological inventory and the corresponding acoustic variation was found but the linear correlation was not strongly supported with the findings in the present study.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.77-91
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• 2001

This paper investigates the timing of Korean spoken in a news-reading speech style in order to improve the naturalness of durations used in Korean speech synthesis. Each segment in a corpus of 671 read sentences was annotated with 69 segmental and prosodic features so that the measured duration could be correlated with the context in which it occurred. A CART model based on the features showed a correlation coefficient of 0.79 with an RMSE (root mean squared prediction error) of 23 ms between actual and predicted durations in reserved test data. These results are comparable with recent published results in Korean and similar to results found in other languages. An analysis of the classification tree shows that phrasal structure has the greatest effect on the segment duration, followed by syllable structure and the manner features of surrounding segments. The place features of surrounding segments only have small effects. The model has application in Korean speech synthesis systems.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.4E
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• pp.26-30
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• 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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.35-43
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• 2001

New speech synthesis algorithms capable of flexible prosody (especially F0) modification are desired for a high quality TTS system. TD-PSOLA is the most popular synthesis algorithm. The algorithm shows very high quality when F0 modification is limited. However, the quality degradation due to pitch epoch detection error becomes severe as the F0 modification factor becomes large. On the other hand, the vocoder framework is very flexible in F0 manipulation. The synthesized speech quality from the vocoder is far from natural human speech and suffers from buzziness. To remedy the buzzy quality from the vocoder and make more natural synthetic speech, we propose a mixed phase vocoder.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.153-161
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• 2014

The current study reports the results from a cross-modal naming experiment investigating the effects of a prosodic boundary location on the comprehension of ambiguous dative NPs in Korean (Yeongmi-ka Ceonghi-eykey norae-rul pwulecwu-n pwuin-ul ${\cdots}$). The underlined dative NP, Ceonghi-eykey, can temporarily be attached to the embedded rel-marked verb, pwulecwu-n ('sing-rel') or to the matrix verb to appear later. Participants heard sentence fragments manipulated for the location of Intonation Phrase boundary (the biggest prosodic boundary in the model of Seoul Korean) and right after that, had to name visually presented naming targets, which resolve the ambiguity of dative NPs. The prosodic manipulation did not result in difference in naming time, suggesting that the location of a prosodic boundary failed to influence the way Korean listeners interpreted ambiguous dative NPs. Possible reasons for the null effect were discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.219-234
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• 2000

The study of boundary tones in connected speech or dialogues is one of the most underdeveloped areas of Korean prosody. This. paper concerns the boundary tones of intonational phrase-final morphemes which are shown in the speech corpus of dialogues. Results of phonetic analysis show that different kinds of boundary tones are realized, depending on the positions of the intonational phrase-final morphemes in the sentences.. This study has also shown that boundary tone patterning is somewhat related to the sentence structure, and for better speech recognition and speech synthesis, it presents a simple model of boundary tones based on the fundamental frequency contour. The results of this study will contribute to our understanding of the prosodic pattern of Korean connected speech or dialogues.