Some accentual characteristics in Japanese phrases and long compounds

Abstract

This paper focuses on an analysis of accentual characteristics in Japanese phrases and in long compounds for the purpose of fine prosody control in Japanese text-to-speech conversion. With respect to Japanese phrase accent analysis, the secondary accent generation is shown to depend on (a) whether or not an anterior constituent word is accented, (b) phrase length and (c) the constituent word accent attributes. Moreover, the fundamental frequency patterns of phrases having a secondary accent are studied to demonstrate their systematic controllability. In terms of long compound analysis, characteristics regarding segmentation into smaller utterance groups are discussed in relation to their syntactic structure. Furthermore, their accentuation characteristics are analyzed by comparing with ordinary short compound accentuation. These results indicate the possibilities of further prosody control and the necessity for syntactic analysis for such control in Japanese text-to-speech conversion.