Abstract
We describe models of Mandarin prosody that allow us to make quantitative measurements of prosodic strengths. These models use Stem-ML, which is a phenomenological model of the muscle dynamics and planning process that controls the tension of the vocal folds, and therefore the pitch of speech. Because Stem-ML describes the interactions between nearby tones, we were able to capture surface tonal variations using a highly constrained model with only one template for each lexical tone category, and a single prosodic strength per word. The model accurately reproduces the intonation of the speaker, capturing 87% of the variance of f0 with these strength parameters. The result reveals alternating metrical patterns in words, and shows that the speaker marks a hierarchy of boundaries by controlling the prosodic strength of words. The strengths we obtain are also correlated with syllable duration, mutual information and part-of-speech.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 625-645 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | Speech Communication |
Volume | 41 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2003 |
Keywords
- Intonation
- Metrical pattern
- Muscle dynamics
- Prosodic strength
- Prosodic structure
- Prosody modeling
- Text-to-speech
- Tonal variation
- Tone
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Modeling and Simulation
- Communication
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Computer Science Applications