Japanese prosodic phrasing and intonation synthesis

Abstract

A computer program for synthesizing Japanese fundamental frequency contours implements our theory of Japanese intonation. This theory provides a complete qualitative description of the known characteristics of Japanese intonation, as well as a quantitative model of tone-scaling and timing precise enough to translate straightforwardly into a computational algorithm. An important aspect of the description is that various features of the intonation pattern are designated to be phonological properties of different types of phrasal units in a hierarchical organization. This phrasal organization is known to play an important role in parsing speech. Our research shows it also to be one reflex of intonational prominence, and hence of focus and other discourse structures. The qualitative features of each phrasal level and their implementation in the synthesis program are described.