The prosody of fluent connected speech is much more complicated than concatenating individual sentence intonations into strings. We analyzed speech corpora of read Mandarin Chinese discourses from a top-down perspective on perceived units and boundaries, and consistently identified speech paragraphs of multiple phrases that reflected discourse rather than sentence effects in fluent speech. Subsequent cross-speaker and cross-speaking-rate acoustic analyses of identified speech paragraphs revealed systematic cross-phrase prosodic patterns in every acoustic parameter, namely, F 0 contours, duration adjustment, intensity patterns, and in addition, boundary breaks. We therefore argue for a higher prosodic node that governs, constrains, and groups phrases to derive speech paragraphs. A hierarchical multi-phrase framework is constructed to account for the governing effect, with complimentary production and perceptual evidences. We show how cross-phrase F 0 and syllable duration patterns templates are derived to account for the tune and rhythm characteristic to fluent speech prosody, and argue for a prosody framework that specifies phrasal intonations as subjacent sister constituent subject to higher terms. Output fluent speech prosody is thus cumulative results of contributions from every prosodic layer. To test our framework, we further construct a modular prosody model of multiplephrase grouping with four corresponding acoustic modules and begin testing the model with speech synthesis. To conclude, we argue that any prosody framework of fluent speech should include prosodic contributions above individual sentences in production, with considerations of its perceptual effects to on-line processing; and development of unlimited TTS could benefit most appreciably by capturing and including cross-phrase relationships in prosody modeling. Ó 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Phrase grouping is essential to characterize the prosody for Mandarin fluent speech. Evidence of prosodic phrase grouping has been found both in adjustments of F 0 contours and temporal allocations within and across phrases. In this paper, we discuss the development of a Mandarin TTS system that integrates the prosody processing modules, such as duration modeling, F 0 modeling, and break predictions. The database consists of 1292*3 syllable-tokens chopped off specially designed threephrase carrier sentences. Since temporal allocations and rhythmic structure in speech flow are carefully dealt with, the TTS system is capable of converting long paragraph text input into natural synthesized speech output.
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