Prosody Analysis of Malay Language Storytelling Corpus

Abstract

In this paper, the prosody of the storytelling speech corpus is analyzed. The main objective of the analysis is to develop prosody rules to convert neutral speech to storytelling speech. The speech corpus (neutral and storytelling speech) contains 464 speech sentences, 4,656 words, and 10,928 syllables. It was recorded by three female storytellers, one male professional speaker, two female speakers and two male speakers. The prosodic features considered for analysis are tempo, pause (sentence and phrase-level), duration, intensity, and pitch. Further analysis of the word categories exist in storytelling speech such as verb, adverb, adjective, noun, conjunction and amplifier are also conducted. The global prosody analysis showed that mean prosodic of storytelling is higher than neutral speech, especially intensity and pitch. Investigation on the word categories showed that words categorized as adverb, adjective, amplifier and conjunctions have significant number of prominent syllables. Meanwhile, nouns and verbs do not have significant difference between neutral and storytelling speech. Positions of the words (i.e. initial, middle, last) in a phrase for different word categories also proved to have different increasing factor in duration, pitch and intensity.