Modeling prosody: Different approaches

Abstract

Prosody pervades all aspects of a speech signal, both in terms of raw acoustic outcomes and linguistically meaningful units, from the phoneme to the discourse unit. It is carried in the suprasegmental features of fundamental frequency, loudness, and duration. Several models have been developed to account for the way prosody organizes speech, and they vary widely in terms of their theoretical assumptions, organizational primitives, actual procedures of application to speech, and intended use (e.g., to generate speech from text vs. to model the prosodic phonology of a language). In many cases, these models overtly contradict one another with regard to their fundamental premises or their identification of the perceptible objects of linguistic prosody. These competing models are directly compared. Each model is applied to the same speech samples. This parallel analysis allows for a critical inspection of each model and its efficacy in assessing the suprasegmental behavior of the speech. The analyses illustrate how different approaches are better equipped to account for different aspects of prosody. Viewing the models and their successes from an objective perspective allows for creative possibilities in terms of combining strengths from models which might otherwise be considered fundamentally incompatible.