The Original ToBi System and the Evolution of the ToBi Framework

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the original ToBI system. It reviews the design of the original ToBI system and its foundations in basic and applied research. It describes the inter-disciplinary community of users and uses for which the system was intended, and it outlines how the consensus model of American English intonation and inter-word juncture was achieved by finding points of useful intersection among the research interests and knowledge embodied in this community. It thus identifies the practical principles for designing prosodic annotation conventions that emerged in the course of developing, testing, and using this particular system. The chapter also describes how the original ToBI conventions have been evolved to be the general annotation conventions for several other English varieties and for a number of other languages.

The Implicit Prosody of Corrective Contrast Primes Appropriately Intonated Probes (for Some Readers)

“…A coder with extensive training ToBI-annotated (Tones and Break Indices; Beckman, Hirschberg, & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2005) the following relevant sentences from the text passage: Not that would-be revolutionaries haven't tried to "improve" the automobile with a host of innovations and But designers don't control how cars are built, manufacturers control how cars are built. These sentences were chosen because they contained words that participants most frequently pronounced with emphasis or contrast.…”

Inter-transcriber reliability for two systems of prosodic annotation: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch)

“…ToBI is based on a phonological approach to prosody, that of autosegmental-metrical theory (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986;Dilley, 2005;Goldsmith, 1976;Liberman, 1975;Pierrehumbert, 1980), and its labeling conventions are largely based on the theoretical work of Pierrehumbert and colleagues (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986;Pierrehumbert, 1980;Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988), as well as earlier labeling systems (Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Fong, 1991;Wightman, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Ostendorf, & Price, 1992). Variants of ToBI have been proposed for a number of languages and dialects (Jun, 2005); in the present document, we will use "ToBI" to refer exclusively to the version that Beckman et al (2005) proposed for Mainstream American English. A standard ToBI transcription consists of four tiers of labels time-aligned with the speech signal: (1) an orthographic tier, on which text is labeled; (2) a tonal tier for labeling pitch events; (3) a break-index tier for labeling perceived disjuncture between words; and (4) a miscellaneous tier for additional information.…”

What prosody tells infants to believe

“…Usually pitch accents are manually classified by trained specialists using acoustic recordings and graphical representations of the pitch contour over time [25]. Manual classification tends not to produce high amounts of agreement among experts [27].…”

“…The labeling scheme summarized here is the basis for the popular ToBI representation of prosody [24], [25].…”