TY - GEN
T1 - Speaker's intentions conveyed to listeners by sentence-final particles and their intonations in Japanese conversational speech
AU - Iwata, Kazuhiko
AU - Kobayashi, Tetsunori
PY - 2013/10/18
Y1 - 2013/10/18
N2 - We investigated listeners' perception of speaker's intention depending on sentence-final particles and their intonations in Japanese conversational speech in order to build a speech synthesis system that can express different intentions and subtle nuances. First, we clustered F0 contours derived from approximately 2000 sentence-final syllables and found the sentence-final F0 contours varied a great deal. Next, we selected six distinctive F0 contours that gave perceptually different intonations from among the cluster centroids, and subjectively evaluated synthesized sentence utterances that had various sentence-final particles and their intonations. Results showed that suitable combinations of a sentence-final particle and its intonation should be used to precisely convey the intention to the listeners, and whether the sentence was positive or negative also affected the listeners' perception of the intention.
AB - We investigated listeners' perception of speaker's intention depending on sentence-final particles and their intonations in Japanese conversational speech in order to build a speech synthesis system that can express different intentions and subtle nuances. First, we clustered F0 contours derived from approximately 2000 sentence-final syllables and found the sentence-final F0 contours varied a great deal. Next, we selected six distinctive F0 contours that gave perceptually different intonations from among the cluster centroids, and subjectively evaluated synthesized sentence utterances that had various sentence-final particles and their intonations. Results showed that suitable combinations of a sentence-final particle and its intonation should be used to precisely convey the intention to the listeners, and whether the sentence was positive or negative also affected the listeners' perception of the intention.
KW - conversational speech
KW - sentence-final intonation
KW - sentence-final particle
KW - speaker's intention
KW - speech synthesis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84890494252&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84890494252&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICASSP.2013.6638998
DO - 10.1109/ICASSP.2013.6638998
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84890494252
SN - 9781479903566
T3 - ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
SP - 6895
EP - 6899
BT - 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2013 - Proceedings
T2 - 2013 38th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2013
Y2 - 26 May 2013 through 31 May 2013
ER -