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

任何对合成语音、文本转语音或语音识别技术稍有经验的人都能敏锐地意识到，我们对人类语音的节奏和语调仍有多少不了解。语调是极其重要的：语调轮廓的变化——说话过程中声调的上升和下降的特征——可以极大地改变所传达的意思。(比较“He's reliable”和“He's reliable”。“他可靠吗?”)即使其他一切都是正确的，语调错误也会使讲话听起来不像母语，最坏的情况下甚至不像人类。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自信地说出一个给定的话语是否传达了“怀疑”或“无可奈何的接受”，就像他们通常不能判断一个给定的发音序列是否表示“猫”一样。语调意味着什么，以及究竟是什么承载了这个意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持不同意见。本项目旨在通过采用几个特别困难的美国英语语调的例子，使用几种互补的实验方法来克服这一问题。比较这些不同方法的结果不仅可以回答有关美式英语的孤立问题，而且更重要的是，可以回答有关如何测试语调的相互竞争理论的更广泛的问题。目的是研究人类语言语调的共识方法。实现这一目标的成功将改善新兴的语音技术及其跨语言应用，并帮助语言学领域的工作者和第二语言教师努力解决如何在给定语言的语调系统中传达有意义的内容的问题。

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.