14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Perception of Synthetic Sentences with Indistinct Intonation in Czech

M. Dohalská-Zichová (1), T. Dubědá (2), J. Mejvaldová (1,2)

(1) Institute of Phonetics, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
(2) Université Paris 7 (Denis Diderot), France

The topic of the present paper rises from our preceding experiments with natural sentences and it is a part of our longterm research concerning the role of duration and intensity in synthetic speech. We assume that these two parameters play a part not only on the rhythmical and phonostylistic levels, but also act, together with the intonation, on the modal level (difference between a statement, a question, an order etc.). We tested three short informative sentences with seven different intonation patterns in four variants for the presence/absence of variation of duration and intensity. The F₀ curbs show a perception symmetricity shifted toward the assertive pole. As far as the role of duration and intensity is concerned, they turned out to contribute slightly to keeping the categories assertive/interrogative apart.

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Bibliographic reference.  Dohalská-Zichová, M. / Dubědá, T. / Mejvaldová, J. (1999): "Perception of synthetic sentences with indistinct intonation in Czech", In ICPhS-14, 2335-2338.