Beyond sentence prosody: paragraph intonation in Dutch

The present research aims at a partial model for synthesized text intonation, restricted to utterances consisting of a single intonation phrase. Intonational characteristics of short utterances in different positions within a paragraph are investigated. The effects of position in the paragraph on sentence prosody are mainly located in the beginning of the utterance. A model is formulated to capture the main findings. The model is then perceptually evaluated. The results indicate that the model can be used to improve the naturalness of rule-based intonation in a system for automatic text-to-speech conversion.