Second ESCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis September 12-15, 1994 Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY, USA

Prosodic and Intonational Domains in Speech Synthesis

Erwin Marsi, Peter-Arno Coppen, Carlos Gussenhoven, Toni Rietveld

Department of Language and Speech, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

This research concerns the restructuring of Association Domains (ADs) in Dutch. An AD is the intonational domain within which an autosegmental description of an intonation contour is phonetically realised. Restructuring is the process that joins two ADs to form a single AD. The hypotheses addressed here state that restructuring depends on the syntactic structure, in this case the distinction between a PP that is internal or external to an NP, in combination with the length of the resultant AD. Statistically significant evidence was supplied by a perception experiment in which raters judged which of two contours, one with two ADs and the other with a single restructured AD, was more appropriate, given an utterance with one of the two syntactic structures mentioned.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Marsi, Erwin / Coppen, Peter-Arno / Gussenhoven, Carlos / Rietveld, Toni (1994): "Prosodic and intonational domains in speech synthesis", In SSW2-1994, 224-227.