Corpus based extraction of quantitative prosodic parameters of stress groups in Spanish

We introduce a new corpus-based technique to model the prosodic information contained in spoken utterances. Taking the stress groups and intonation group as the structural building blocks and Bezier parametric functions to approximate FO contours, we propose a statistical modeling of the relevant categories of stress groups. These models can be directly exploited in speech synthesis tasks in order to get more natural intonation patterns, specially for text reading applications. Suggestions are also made as for the utility of these statistical models in classification and recognition tasks.