Suprasegmentality

If a sentence is spoken with little or no affective content, i.e. in a discourse-neutral manner, we still see characteristic patterns in the phrasing, rhythm, pitch, voice quality and timing. Typical effects include phones at the ends of sentences or phrases being lengthened, syntactically salient words (e.g. heads) having more emphasis, FO levels being higher at the starts of sentences and so on. 

In tone languages like Mandarin, pitch can be used to identify words. For example, liu spoken with one tone pattern means flow , but when spoken with a different tone pattern means six . In our model, this is a purely suprasegmental effect and treated in just the same way as nasalisation is used to distinguish words in English. Mandarin of course has intonation also, which is used for all the same affects as English. The fact that intonation and parts of word identity are expressed in the same acoustic variable does of course complicate analysis and synthesis somewhat, but with modern synthesis techniques we can model both without difficulty 

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Therefore, spasticity may arise Ifom particularly the musculoskeletal injury, that invariably give rise to a duration from a standard with regard to the observed afferent impulse traffic into the spinal cord. In this manner an inflicted injury slowly leads to the disease related to either motor nerves, or intemeiuons within the cord, or sensory neurons located in the sensory ganglia and ultimately boils down to the brain disorders thereby changing the regular flow of suprasegmental impulses to the motor neurons. Thus, the virtual cause of impairment to the motor neurons in the brain leads to involun-taiy movement as could be seen in Parkinsonism, chorea and palsies. 

Kozlov, G. V. Sanditov, D. S. Serdyuk V. D. On suprasegmental formations type in polymers amorphous state. High-Molecular Compounds. B, 1993, 35(12), 2067-2069. 

In sununary, augmentative prosody works by changing the default suprasegmental content of an utterance in particular ways. It is used by the speaker solely to increase the chances of the verbal message being correctly decoded and understood. Significantly, unlike affective prosody, it imparts no extra information into the message. 

Of all the prosodic phenomena we have examined intonational tune is the most heavily related to augmentative and particularly affective content. In situations where these effects are absent, we can say to a first approximation that all utterances have in fact the same intonational tune the only differences occur as to where the pitch accents and boundary tones which make up this tune are positioned. Hence we can almost argue that for discourse neutral synthesis, there simply isn t any intonational tune prediction to be done. In other words, the real task is to predict a suitable FO contour that e q)resses the prominence and phrasing patterns and encodes the suprasegmental, rather than true prosodic patterns of the utteranee. 

While we can describe prominence and phrasing in quite abstract high level terms, this is significantly harder with intonation as all theories to a greater or lesser extent make exphcit references to FO patterns, levels and dynamics. Given this, and the fact that for the most part we are generating discourse neutral suprasegmental intonation, we will leave the entire topic of intonation until Chapter 9. 

Suprasegmental prosody arises from the natural patterns of how words are joined together in utterances. 

Aylett, M. P. Stochastic suprasegmentals Relationships between redundancy, prosodic structure and care of articulation in spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech and Language Processing 2000 (2000). 

Firstly, let us separate the issue of generating a signal that contains a particular prosodic effect (for example surprise, or accentuation of a particular word) from the issue of deciding how to do this automatically from the text. The issue of the realisation of a particular prosodic form is by no means easy, but it is certainly more tractable than the second issue. In essence it is no different from other parts of the synthesis problem in that we can collect data with this effect, stu how suprasegmental features vary with respect to this effect and so on. 

Malerere, F., Dutoit, T., and Mertens, P. Automatic prosody generation using suprasegmental unit selection. In International Conference on Speech and Language Processing (1998). 

Hence, this chapter results demonstrated common reinforcement mechanism of natural and artificial (filled with inorganic nanofiller) polymer nanocomposites. The statistical segments number per one nanocluster reduction at nanofiller contents growth is such a mechanism on suprasegmental level. The indicated effect physical foundation is the densely packed interfacial regions formation in artificial nanocomposites. 

The Gibbs function of suprasegmental (cluster) structure self-assembly at temperature T=T - AT was calculated as follows [45] ... 

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