Prosodic rules for the implementation of phrase boundaries in synthetic speech

From previous research it is known that speakers use the prosodic cues pause and pitch to audibly structure their spoken messages. Listeners, on the other hand, use these phonetic cues to determine the degree of disjuncture in the flow of speech, which supposedly helps them to process the meaning of the utterances. In the research reported here, a professional speaker's phrasing behavior was modeled in various sets of rules, corresponding to different levels of prosodic boundary strength. These phrasing rules were evaluated as to their acceptability and it appeared that several of them improve the quality of the synthetic speech. The rule set implementing five levels of boundary strength improved this quality more than rule sets with fewer levels. In fact, it appeared that this rule set produces synthetic speech which is prosodically almost as good as a copy-synthesis version with natural prosody

Prosodic phrasing at the sentence level

Prosody can play various roles in speech communication. One possible function of pitch contour choice, temporal variation, or pause duration is to give phonetic support to the information structure of the message. In particular, prosody is capable of demarcating the syntactic-semantic units that make up the utterance. This paper examines how a professional speaker behaves in that respect. We dedicate our study to Kathy Harris, whose stimulating work in speech production has covered much more ground than the mechanics of articulation or phonation, but also addressed the issue of how a speaker's behavior reflects the higher-order, linguistic, organization of the message

Prosodic cues to the perception of constituent boundaries

This article is concerned with the relationship between the strength of prosodic boundaries in spoken utterances as perceived by untrained listeners and the phonetic cues melodic discontinuity, pause and declination reset. It is shown that boundary strength can be approached and measured as a perceptual variable in its own right. Clear relationships are found between perceptual boundary strength and both phonetic events and predicted prosodic boundary levels