Identifying prosodic prominence patterns for English text-to-speech synthesis

This thesis proposes to improve and enrich the expressiveness of English Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis by identifying and generating natural patterns of prosodic prominence. In most state-of-the-art TTS systems the prediction from text of prosodic prominence relations between words in an utterance relies on features that very loosely account for the combined effects of syntax, semantics, word informativeness and salience, on prosodic prominence. To improve prosodic prominence prediction we first follow up the classic approach in which prosodic prominence patterns are flattened into binary sequences of pitch accented and pitch unaccented words. We propose and motivate statistic and syntactic dependency based features that are complementary to the most predictive features proposed in previous works on automatic pitch accent prediction and show their utility on both read and spontaneous speech. Different accentuation patterns can be associated to the same sentence. Such variability rises the question on how evaluating pitch accent predictors when more patterns are allowed. We carry out a study on prosodic symbols variability on a speech corpus where different speakers read the same text and propose an information-theoretic definition of optionality of symbolic prosodic events that leads to a novel evaluation metric in which prosodic variability is incorporated as a factor affecting prediction accuracy. We additionally propose a method to take advantage of the optionality of prosodic events in unit-selection speech synthesis. To better account for the tight links between the prosodic prominence of a word and the discourse/sentence context, part of this thesis goes beyond the accent/no-accent dichotomy and is devoted to a novel task, the automatic detection of contrast, where contrast is meant as a (Information Structure’s) relation that ties two words that explicitly contrast with each other. This task is mainly motivated by the fact that contrastive words tend to be prosodically marked with particularly prominent pitch accents. The identification of contrastive word pairs is achieved by combining lexical information, syntactic information (which mainly aims to identify the syntactic parallelism that often activates contrast) and semantic information (mainly drawn from the Word- Net semantic lexicon), within a Support Vector Machines classifier. Once we have identified patterns of prosodic prominence we propose methods to incorporate such information in TTS synthesis and test its impact on synthetic speech naturalness trough some large scale perceptual experiments. The results of these experiments cast some doubts on the utility of a simple accent/no-accent distinction in Hidden Markov Model based speech synthesis while highlight the importance of contrastive accents

Aspekte der Charakterisierung phonologischer Sprachstörungen vs. verzögerter Spracherwerb bei jordanischem Arabisch sprechenden Kindern

Bader S'da SI. Issues in the characterisation of phonological speech impairment vs. delayed acquisition in Jordanian Arabic-Speaking children. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2010.Eine Studie des Spracherwerbs des jordanischen Arabisch bei jungen Muttersprachlern.A study with children speaking or acquiring Jordanian Arabic with or without phonological impairments

A Romance language perspective

This book presents a collection of pioneering papers reflecting current methods in prosody research with a focus on Romance languages. The rapid expansion of the field of prosody research in the last decades has given rise to a proliferation of methods that has left little room for the critical assessment of these methods. The aim of this volume is to bridge this gap by embracing original contributions, in which experts in the field assess, reflect, and discuss different methods of data gathering and analysis. The book might thus be of interest to scholars and established researchers as well as to students and young academics who wish to explore the topic of prosody, an expanding and promising area of study

Prosodic Font : the space between the spoken and the written

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1998."August 1998."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-133).by Tara Michelle Graber Rosenberger.S.M

On marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles in Castilian Spanish

This book provides a new perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, wh-exclamatives, and discourse particles in the Madrid variety of Spanish. It argues that some marked forms differ from unmarked forms in that they encode modal evaluations of the at-issue meaning. Two epistemic evaluations that can be shown to be encoded by intonation in Spanish are linguistically encoded surprise, or mirativity, and obviousness. An empirical investigation via an audio-enhanced production experiment finds that mirativity and obviousness are associated with distinct intonational features under constant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement showing an impact on obvious declaratives. Wh-exclamatives are found not to differ significantly in intonational marking from neutral declaratives, showing that they need not be miratives. Moreover, we find that intonational marking on different discourse particles in natural dialogue correlates with their meaning contribution without being fully determined by it. In part, these findings quantitatively confirm previous qualitative findings on the meaning of intonational configurations in Madrid Spanish. But they also add new insights on the role intonation plays in the negotiation of commitments and expectations between interlocutors