Third ESCA/COCOSDA Workshop on Speech Synthesis November 26-29, 1998 Jenolan Caves House, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

Modeling Japanese Boundary Pitch Movements for Speech Synthesis

Jennifer J. Venditti (1,2), Kazuaki Maeda (3), Jan P. H. van Santen (1)

(1) Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
(2) Ohio State University, USA
(3) University of Pennsylvania, USA 12/3/1

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the intonational form and function of five boundary pitch movements (BPMs) in Tokyo Japanese. The perception study describes the linguistic and paralinguistic dimensions on which meanings of the BPMs are distinguished. The production study details how the F0 heights, durations, and (crucially) alignment of the F0 contour with the segments are all used to define the movement types. We suggest a quantitative model of F0 contour alignment which uses observed data to model the entire shape of F0 curves.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Venditti, Jennifer J. / Maeda, Kazuaki / Santen, Jan P. H. van (1998): "Modeling Japanese Boundary Pitch Movements for Speech Synthesis", In SSW3-1998, 317-322.