On the Alignment of Prosodic Events

Abstract:

The current study examinesthe relationship between intonational gestures as given by the accent commands of the Fujisaki model and the syllabic grid on the example of spontaneous American English from the Buckeye Corpus. Asaninitial step the data were labelled according to American English ToBI conventions. Intensity contours were extracted from the band-filtered speech signal and modelled using a second-order linear model like the accent control mechanism of the Fujisaki model. It wasobserved that certain accent types such as L* occasionally required the use of accent commands with negative polarity. The timing properties of the underlying accent commands correspond to the type of accentlabel, i.e., for instance, early for H*L and late for L*H. Accents in the vicinity of a boundary exhibited slightly higher accent command amplitudes whereas the highest syllable command amplitudes were observed for phrase-initial and medial accents. With respect to the alignment of accent commands, the onsets of syllable commandsdid not prove to be more precise anchoring points than the segmental boundaries of the syllable.


Year: 2010
In session: Session in Honor of Hiroya Fujisaki
Pages: 15 to 22