BEYOND SENTENCE PROSODY - PARAGRAPH INTONATION IN DUTCH

The present research aims at a partial model for synthesized text into nation, restricted to utterances consisting of a single intonation phr ase. Intonational characteristics of short utterances in different pos itions within a paragraph are investigated. The effects of position in the paragraph on sentence prosody are mainly located in the beginning of the utterance. A model is formulated to capture the main findings. The model is then perceptually evaluated. The results indicate that t he model can be used to improve the naturalness of rule-based intonati on in a system for automatic text-to-speech conversion.