A computational model of target oriented production of prosody

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The two main goals of the proposed project are, first, to establish a novel paradigm of research into the production of prosody and, second, to provide experimental evidence for several assumptions made by the computational model underlying the proposed approach. In the framework of the proposed research project a computational prosody model will be implemented that has its motivation both in the theory of speech production and in linguistic theory. The computational model is intended to serve two main purposes. First, it will allow us to empirically test a number of assumptions made by the production model, for instance the effect of speaking rate and other factors related to speech timing on the acoustic realization of intonational gestures. Second, the linguistically based classification of intonational events, e g those related to (a) discourse structure (register, pitch range), (b) information structure (topic, focus), and (c) accentual patterns (pitch accents, tones, tunes), can be experimentally tested by trainable intonation event classifiers. In accordance with the postural relaxation hypothesis we expect such a learned neural mapping, based on adjustable adaptive weights, to tend consistently towards comfortable realization configurations, either under the influence of temporal constraints or as part of a tune (a coherent sequence of intonational events), as long as the perceptual target region is traversed.