Realization of linguistic information in the voice fundamental frequency contour of the spoken Japanese

Although it has been well known that prosody plays an important role both in the intelligibility and in the naturalness of speech, the process of generating natural prosody from linguistic information has not been fully understood. The authors first define units of prosody of spoken Japanese on the basis of analysis of fundamental frequency contours. Prosodic words are defined by the presence of an accent component, while prosodic phrases and clauses are defined by the presence/absence of a pause and resetting/addition of a phrase component. It is shown that the accent components, representing the information concerning lexical word accent, are modified systematically by the syntactic and the discourse information. Classifications of prosodic boundaries are also presented, and the relationship between these two kinds of boundary is described