Finding prosodic events using voice source measurements over multiple syllables.
Ran Han, Jeung-Yoon Choi · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Voice source measurements such as slope and convexity of pitch, harmonic structure, spectral tilt, and amplitude have been shown to be closely correlated with prosodic events, and using these measurements over multiple syllables has been shown to produce better performance than using measurements taken over a single syllable. In this study, these measurements for specific prosodic events, namely, for nine types of accents are more closed examined, observed in the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus. Examination of distributions of these measurements at various accent levels shows that the presence of a high accent is correlated with less negative slopes of these measurements and a low accent is correlated with more negative slopes. From ANOVA tests, analyses show that several measurements yield high significance in distinguishing among accent levels. This study also includes an examination of the distributions of these measurements across boundary levels, and results show that voice source measurements are useful in distinguishing among the various accent levels in prosody.