Pitch contour control in Japanese conversational speech

In this paper, pitch patterns of Japanese conversational speech are discussed. In speech communication, a speaker often emphasizes the words which he considers important to convey his message to a listener. We observed the change of pitch contour in the case that a certain word is emphasized by analyzing the real speech, and the relation between the pitch control and the stressed word was tested by hearing the synthesized speech. The results of these experiments show that the pitch contour differs according to the accent type of each word and it is possible to control the pitch contour as a certain word is heard to be emphasized.