Pitch Accents, Boundary Tones and Contours: Automatic Learning of Czech Intonation

Abstract

This paper examines three methods of intonational stylization in the Czech language: a sequence of pitch accents, a sequence of boundary tones, and a sequence of contours. The efficiency of these methods was compared by means of a neural network which predicted the f0 curve from each of the three types of input, with subsequent perceptual assessment.

The results show that Czech intonation can be learned with about the same success rate in all three situations. This speaks in favour of a rehabilitation of contours as a traditional means of describing Czech intonation, as well as the use of boundary tones as another possible local approach.

Keywords

• Pitch accents
• boundary tones
• contours
• Czech
• prosody
• automatic learning
• neural networks