Analysis and Interpretation of Intonation Contours of Slovene

Prosodic characteristics of natural speech, especially intonation, in many cases represent specific feelings of the speaker at the time of the utterance, with relatively vast variations of speaking styles over the same text. We analyzed a collected speech corpus, recorded with ten Slovene speakers. Interpretation of observed intonation contours was done for the purpose of modelling the intonation contour in synthesis process. We devised a scheme for modeling the intonation contour for different types of intonation units based on the results of analyzing intonation contours. The intonation scheme uses a superpositional approach, which defines the intonation contour as the sum of global (intonation unit) and local (accented syllables or syntactic boundaries) components. Near-to-natural intonation contour was obtained by rules, using only the text of the utterance as input.