Perceived prominence and acoustic parameters in american English

Abstract

This paper describes the relationships between perceived prominence as a gradual value and some acoustic-prosodic parameters. Prominence is used as an intermediate parameter in a speech synthesis system. A corpus of American English utterances was constructed by measuring and annotating various linguistic, acoustic and perceptual parameters and features. The investigation of the corpus revealed some strong and some rather weak relations between prominence and acoustic-prosodic parameters that serve as a starting point for the development of prominence-based rules for the synthesis of American English prosody in a content-to-speech system.