Beyond sentence prosody: paragraph intonation in Dutch.
The present research aims at a partial model for synthesized text intonation, restricted to utterances consisting of a single intonation phrase. Intonational characteristics of short utterances in different positions within a paragraph are investigated. The effects of position in the paragraph on sentence prosody are mainly located in the beginning of the utterance. A model is formulated to capture the main findings. The model is then perceptually evaluated. The results indicate that the model can be used to improve the naturalness of rule-based intonation in a system for automatic text-to-speech conversion.
Sluijter
A M
AM
Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Terken
J M
JM
D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009426:Netherlands; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement