Krista Kerge¹, Meelis Mihkla², Hille Pajupuu²
¹Tallinn University of Educational Sciences
Narva mnt. 25
10120 Tallinn, ESTONIA
krista.kerge@hot.ee
²Institute of the Estonian Language
Roosikrantsi 6
10119 Tallinn, ESTONIA
Hille.Pajupuu@eki.ee, Meelis.Mihkla@eki.ee
During 1997-2001 an Estonian text-to-speech synthesiser was developed.
Implementation of text-to-speech synthesis, however, is still limited by the
monotony and the poor coherence of the output speech. The prosody of
interrogative sentences has proved a particularly challenging modelling
problem.
The present study deals with the modelling of the fundamental frequency of
kas-initial general questions. Such questions make up 22.5% of the
9000-strong sample of interrogative sentences derived from the Tartu
University Corpus of Estonian Written Texts. Of this sample 40 relevant
questions were recorded as pronounced by four voices, two of them male and
two female. The analysis of the recordings revealed three basic contours
that can be evoked by specific combinations of formalisable conditions.
The report addresses the modelling of those conditions for the synthesiser.
|
|
|