Article2009

Modeling tone and intonation in Mandarin and English as a process of target approximation

Santitham Prom–on · Yi Xu · Bundit Thipakorn

177 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Speech Recognition and Synthesis Voice and Speech Disorders

Abstract

This paper reports the development of a quantitative target approximation (qTA) model for generating F(0) contours of speech. The qTA model simulates the production of tone and intonation as a process of syllable-synchronized sequential target approximation [Xu, Y. (2005). "Speech melody as articulatorily implemented communicative functions," Speech Commun. 46, 220-251]. It adopts a set of biomechanical and linguistic assumptions about the mechanisms of speech production. The communicative functions directly modeled are lexical tone in Mandarin and lexical stress in English and focus in both languages. The qTA model is evaluated by extracting function-specific model parameters from natural speech via supervised learning (automatic analysis by synthesis) and comparing the F(0) contours generated with the extracted parameters to those of natural utterances through numerical evaluation and perceptual testing. The F(0) contours generated by the qTA model with the learned parameters were very close to the natural contours in terms of root mean square error, rate of human identification of tone, and focus and judgment of naturalness by human listeners. The results demonstrate that the qTA model is both an effective tool for research on tone and intonation and a potentially effective system for automatic synthesis of tone and intonation.

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References

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Cited by

2011Differential prosodic encoding of topic and focus in sentence-initial position in Mandarin Chinese 2010In defense of lab speech 2009Organizing syllables into groups—Evidence from F0 and duration patterns in Mandarin 2011The analysis by synthesis of speech melody 2016New Methods for Prosodic Transcription: Capturing Variability as a Source of Information 2011Speech prosody 2010Model-Based Reproduction of Articulatory Trajectories for Consonant–Vowel Sequences

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