A linguistic interpretation of the atom decomposition of fundamental frequency contour for American English

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. One of the most recently proposed techniques for modeling the prosody of an utterance is the decomposition of its pitch, duration and/or energy contour into physiologically motivated units called atoms, based on matching pursuit. Since this model is based on the physiology of the production of sentence intonation, it is essentially language independent. However, the intonation of an utterance in a particular language is obviously under the influence of factors of a predominantly linguistic nature. In this research, restricted to the case of American English with prosody annotated using standard ToBI conventions, we have shown that, under certain mild constraints, the positive and negative atoms identified in the pitch contour coincide very well with high and low pitch accents and phrase accents of ToBI. By giving a linguistic interpretation of the atom decomposition model, this research enables its practical use in domains such as speech synthesis or cross-lingual prosody transfer.