Algorithms for acoustic prosodic analysis

Algorithms have been implemented for finding voiced regions, estimating Fo on a perceptually-useful tone scale, detecting syllabic nuclei and delimiting the syllabic nucleus, smoothing Fo in either straightforward left-to-right form or by island-driven analysis centered on syllabic nuclei, detecting phrase boundaries from Fo valleys, and assigning stresses based on context-dependent combinations of acoustic cues. Experiments showed that island-driven smoothing of Fo contours yields more corrections and smoother, flatter contours than left-to-right smoothing yields, especially at onsets of voiced regions and in fast speech.