This chapter proposes a consensus system for the annotation of Standard German intonation within the framework of autosegmental-metrical phonology: GToBI. First, it provides a survey of existing studies of German intonation, including traditional auditory approaches as well as more recent phonological studies and instrumental analyses. It then gives a detailed exposition of GToBI, showing how the intonation contours considered to be distinctive in the surveyed works can be captured, and compares GToBI to three earlier autosegmental-metrical approaches to German intonation. Finally, it discusses a number of theoretical issues, such as whether pitch accents need to be represented with leading tones or not, how many levels of phrasing are required, and the status and distribution of phrase accents.

A diverse set of speech data was labelled in three sites by 13 transcribers with differing levels of expertise, using GToBI, a consensus transcription system for German intonation. Overall inter-transcriber-consistency suggests that, with training, labellers can acquire sufficient skill with GToBI for large-scale database labelling.

In this study we investigate the intonational characteristics of the four utterance types statement, wh-question, yes/no-question and declarative question. Readings of two German scripted dialogues were examined to ascertain characteristic features of the F0 contour for each utterance type. Final boundary tone, nuclear pitch accent, F0 offset, F0 onset, F0 range, and the slopes of a topline and a bottomline were determined for each utterance and compared for the four utterance types. Results show that for an average speaker, the final boundary tone, the F0 range, and the slope of the topline can be used to distinguish between the four utterance types. However, speakers may deviate from this pattern and exploit other intonational means to distinguish certain utterance types or choose not to mark a syntactic difference at all.

No abstract

A low-cost concatenation based speech synthesis system for German is described which combines the advantage of minimal memory requirements with good intelligibility and high segmental and prosodic acceptability. This is achieved by the multiple use of "microsegments", stretches of speech signal varying in length from demi-phone to phone size. All prosodic structuring is carried out in the time domain.