Research on Prosody for Chinese Sign Language Synthesis

Prosody is the property of natural language. Sign language is a kind of language for the hearing impaired, so the prosody is definitely imbedded in sign language. This makes the prosodic sign language synthesis to be necessary. However, the current research on sign language prosody is mainly concerned with sign language linguistics. This paper studies the prosody of Chinese Sign Language (CSL) from the point of view of computation. We first propose a hierarchical representation model of CSL prosody, which provides an initial computational architecture of CSL synthesis with prosody. Then we present the synthesis of CSL "question" tone prosody based on the aforementioned architecture. Finally, experimental results and evaluation show the enhanced realism and intelligibility of CSL synthesis with prosody.