Prosodic phrase structure

Introduction Besides its intrinsic ability to help the listener in segmenting utterances into linguistically-relevant parts of speech, intonation is an essential means for signaling ": : : of how we feel about what we say, or how we feel when we say." [Bol89, p.1]. How the cognitive representation of the utterance is encoded in the speech signal is still an open question. Two main approaches may contribute to our understanding of how intonation contributes to both the capture of the overall meaning of the message and the speaker's position vis-`a-vis its own discourse: (a) a bottom-up approach aims to extract salient prosodic events with no linguistic a-priori. Such tentative approaches, linking these events to phonological constructs, face the problem of automatic extraction [Mer93, HNE91], the perceptual relevance of these events [tCC90, HR94] and the coherence of labelling [SBP + 92, HdCng], (b) a top-down a

A comprehensive model of intonation for application in speech synthesis

Abstract—In recent years modern techniques involving speech processing have been gaining increasing interest among researchers and companies involved in the integration of new technologies into second language (L2) tutoring systems. At the same time, pronunciation and prosody have finally gained due attention among L2 teachers and learners. The paper describes technical and linguistic specifications for the EURONOUNCE project whose aim is to create software which will integrate non-native speech analysis and recognition with a primary goal of detecting L2 learners ’ pronunciation and prosodic errors and offering multimodal feedback. The software is aimed at specific language pairs, namely Polish, Russian, Czech and Slovak learners of German and vice versa. Beside information concerning the collection, structure and annotation of the multilingual speech corpora the article outlines the feedback system as well as the Pitch Line program which can be implemented in the prosody training module of the Euronounce tutoring system. D I.