Question marking in Hungarian: timing and height of pitch peaks

Gósy, Mária; Terken, Jacques

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30204-9

Cited by 36 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The subsequent fall is realised at the edge. Comparable contours have been observed in other varieties of Italian (for an overview see Savino & Grice 2011), as well as in other languages such as Bengali (Hayes & Lahiri 1991), Bulgarian (Grice et al 1995), Greek (Arvaniti 2001;Arvaniti & Ladd 2009), Hungarian (Ladd 1983;Gósy & Terken 1994;Varga 2002), Russian (e.g., Makarova 2007), and Moroccan Arabic (Benkirane 1998).…”

Section: The Intonation Of Questionsmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…In their seminal study on English, Hadding-Koch & Studdert-Kennedy (1964) showed that listeners were more likely to rate a sentence as a question where there was higher f0 at three reference points (accent peak, post accentual low, and end of the phrase). Subsequent studies have consistently shown that greater pitch excursion in a rise-fall is more frequently perceived as a question than as a statement for a variety of languages, such as Hungarian (Gósy & Terken 1994), Swedish (House 2003), Russian (Makarova 2007), and Bari Italian (Savino & Grice 2007).…”

Section: The Intonation Of Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

Roettger¹

2019

Preprint

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In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements.

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Section: The Intonation Of Questionsmentioning

confidence: 76%

Section: The Intonation Of Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

Roettger¹

2019

Preprint

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“…The motivation for examining glide rate comes from research on intonation perception in normal individuals. Such research suggests that glide rate is relevant to listeners' judgments about intonational contrasts, including contrasts between statements and questions (Gósy & Terken, 1994;Niebuhr, 2003). Hence we examine glide rate in linguistic SQ items that were successfully vs. unsuccessfully discriminated by our amusic participants.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech Intonation Perception Deficits in Musical Tone Deafness (Congenital Amusia)

et al. 2008

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TO WHAT EXTENT DO MUSIC and language share neural mechanisms for processing pitch patterns? Musical tone-deafness (amusia) provides important evidence on this question. Amusics have problems with musical melody perception, yet early work suggested that they had no problems with the perception of speech intonation (Ayotte, Peretz, & Hyde, 2002). However, here we show that about 30% of amusics from independent studies (British and French-Canadian) have difficulty discriminating a statement from a question on the basis of a final pitch fall or rise. This suggests that pitch direction perception deficits in amusia (known from previous psychophysical work) can extend to speech. For British amusics, the direction deficit is related to the rate of change of the final pitch glide in statements/ questions, with increased discrimination difficulty when rates are relatively slow. These findings suggest that amusia provides a useful window on the neural relations between melodic processing in language and music.

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“…for Chinese (Yuan et al, 2004), for Castilian Spanish (Face, 2004), for Swedish (House, 2002) and also for Hungarian (Olaszy, 2002;Markó, 2007). It is already verified that in Hungarian the intonation pattern itself in most of the cases is sufficient to distinguish interrogative sentences from declarative ones (Gósy and Terken, 1994). The pitch pattern of Hungarian interrogative sentences is formed according to syllable level rules.…”

Section: Prosody Of Hungarian Interrogative Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…This higher peak and the interrogative pronoun reinforces to the listener that the sentence is interrogative. The F 0 structure of YN questions is unique, they have an uprising intonation part (Gósy and Terken, 1994;Olaszy, 2002), and the exact shape depends on the syllable count of the sentence. In sentences that have only one syllable the pitch value progressively increases throughout the whole sentence (e.g.…”

Section: Prosody Of Hungarian Interrogative Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving HMM speech synthesis of interrogative sentences by pitch track transformations

Nagy

Németh

2016

Speech Communication

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Modeling interrogative sentence prosody is a challenging task due to the significant variation of questions. Prosody is produced by intonation, intensity and duration features. Intonation clearly identifies the type of question in most European languages. If only limited training data is available from certain sentence types, synthetic intonation often lacks accuracy, richness and detail due to averaging, inherent in statistical approaches. In this paper we discuss two rule-based solutions to improve intonation of interrogative sentences. The first approach utilizes a pitch prediction algorithm where a rule-set forms the pitch pattern. The output pattern is combined with an HMM generated F 0 contour and the resulting pattern is used for speech synthesis. Our second solution uses key points to define a scaling function. The position of the key points is described by a rule-set, and the value at intermediate points is calculated in training time in a data-driven way in order to maintain the characteristics of the speakers' voice. The proposed two hybrid rule-based-HMM systems were evaluated by speech experts and by perceptual tests. Our evaluation shows that both approaches could significantly improve the prosodic representation of questions in our framework without deteriorating the perceived naturalness of synthetic speech. The pitch contours generated by the systems were compared and evaluated according to how well they could reproduce the unique characteristics of different Hungarian interrogative sentence types. The analysis shows that both of the methods could successfully model the required patterns. In a separate perception test the interrogative prosody identification rate of the solutions was also measured. The results demonstrate that applying our proposed methods the identification rate of questions could be improved significantly. Although our work focuses on our mother tongue -Hungarian-the methodology can be extended to other languages.

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Question marking in Hungarian: timing and height of pitch peaks

Cited by 36 publications

References 6 publications

Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

Tonal placement in Tashlhiyt: How an intonation system accommodates to adverse phonological environments

Speech Intonation Perception Deficits in Musical Tone Deafness (Congenital Amusia)

Improving HMM speech synthesis of interrogative sentences by pitch track transformations

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