Fourth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis August 29 - September 1, 2001 Perthshire, Scotland

Prosody evaluation as a diagnostic process: subjective vs. objective measurements

Albert Rilliard and Véronique Aubergé

Institut de la Communication Parlée, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France

A set of perception experiments, using reiterant/lexicalized speech, were designed to carry out a diagnostic of the prosodic function of segmentation/hierarchization. Both natural and synthetic intonation were evaluated. Then, several dissimilarity measures - correlation, root-mean-square distance and mutual information on the acoustic parameters (F0, syllabic duration and intensity) - were applied to match the perceptive results. This objective vs. subjective comparison underlines which acoustic keys are used by listeners to judge the adequacy of prosody in performing a given function such as demarcation.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Rilliard, Albert / Aubergé, Véronique (2001): "Prosody evaluation as a diagnostic process: subjective vs. objective measurements", In SSW4-2001, paper 140.