Collaborative Research: Prosodic Categories of American English in Form and Function

任何有过合成语音、文本到语音或语音识别技术经验的人都会敏锐地意识到，我们对人类语音中的节奏和语调仍有多么不了解。语调是极其重要的：语调轮廓的改变--说话过程中声音音调的特征起伏--可以改变所传达的意思，往往是戏剧性的。(请比较“他是可靠的。”v.v.“他可靠吗？”)错误的语调，即使其他一切都是正确的，充其量也会使语音听起来不自然，最糟糕的是甚至不是人类的声音。解决这个问题是一个严峻的挑战，因为语调的区别是难以捉摸的。大多数以英语为母语的人不能肯定地说出一个特定的发音是否传达了“怀疑”或“听天由命的接受”，就像他们通常能分辨出一个特定的发音序列是否意味着“猫”一样。语调的含义和语调的确切含义的问题也反映在实验研究中；研究人员经常对结果的解释存在分歧。这个项目的目的是通过使用几种互补的实验方法，对几个特别困难的美国英语语调实例进行研究，从而克服这一点。对这些不同方法的结果进行比较，将不仅回答有关美国英语的个别问题，更重要的是回答如何测试相互竞争的语调理论的更广泛的问题。我们的目标是用一种共识的方法来研究人类语言中的语调。成功地实现这一目标将改进新兴的语音技术及其在各种语言中的应用，并帮助语言领域的工作人员和第二语言教师努力解决如何在特定语言的语调系统中传达什么是有意义的问题。

Anyone with even passing experience of synthesized speech, text-to-speech, or speech recognition technologies is acutely aware of just how much we still don't understand about rhythm and intonation in human speech. Intonation is extremely important: Changes to an intonation contour -- the characteristic rises and falls of the voice's pitch during an utterance -- can change the meaning conveyed, often dramatically. (Compare "He's reliable." vs. "He's reliable?") Getting intonation wrong, even if everything else is right, makes speech sound at best non-native, at worst even non-human. Fixing this problem is a serious challenge, because intonational distinctions are slippery. Most native speakers cannot say with confidence whether a given utterance does or does not convey "incredulity", or "resigned acceptance", in the same way that they can usually tell whether a given sequence of sounds does or does not mean "cat". The problem of what intonation means and what exactly carries that meaning is reflected in experimental studies as well; researchers frequently disagree about the interpretation of results. This project aims to overcome this by taking on several particularly difficult examples of American English intonation, using several complementary experimental methods. Comparison of the results from these different approaches will answer not just isolated questions about American English, but more importantly broader questions about how to test competing theories of intonation. The goal is a consensus method for investigating intonation in human language in general. Success in reaching that goal will improve emerging speech technologies and their application across languages, as well as helping linguistic field workers and second-language teachers grappling with questions of how to convey what is meaningful in a given language's intonation system.