Verbal communication sentences

Informally we can describe prosody as the part of human communication which expresses emotion, emphasises words, shows speaker attitude, breaks a sentence into phrases, governs sentence rhythm and controls the intonation, pitch or tune of the utterance. This chapter describes how to predict prosodic form from the text while Chapter 9 goes on to describe how to synthesize the acoustics of prosodic from these form representations. In this chapter we first we introduce the various manifestations of prosody in terms of phrasing, prominence and intonation. Next we go on to describe how prosody is used in communication, and in particular explain why this has a much more direct affect on the final speech patterns than with verbal communication. Finally we describe techniques for predicting what prosody should be generated from a text input. 

An important effect of noise emissions in a man-machine-environment-system is the disturbance in verbal communication. When full understanding of sentences is required, the interference sound level for normal messages should be no higher than 10 dB (A) below the speech sound level. For unusual or difficult messages this difference should be increased to 20 dB (A). The maximum distance between speaker and listener which still ensures satisfactory communication can be derived from the speech interference level (SIL). The SIL is the arithmetic mean of the octave sound level in the four octaves with the mean frequencies of 0.5/1/2/4 kHz. Table 6.21 shows the maximum distance between speaker and listener for various SILs. 

Individuals communicate with each other in sort of a code. you can unlock this code, they will believe you truly understand them. When, you match someone s coding system verbally using words from the representational system of their choice, they don t have to re-code to make sense of it. If you know that saying the sounds Sit B. Oey would give you the result of having an animal coordinate his bottom to the floor, you wouldn t care if the words made any sense. The dog doesn t have to know that it is correctly spelled Sit. Boy. In fact, he doesn t even care it isn t a proper sentence. He doesn t know that sit is a verb and a command. All he knows is that those sounds have a code that makes sense to him. Therefore, when you choose the same code as the person speaking, no internal translation has to take place, and your communication is effective. 

One of the reasons why good models of prosody have proved so hard to develop is that researchers have often tried to study prosody without reference to its communicative function. In verbal linguistics it is quite common to study a particular sentence without reference to why a speaker said this, and by and large this separation provides a useful modularity for research purposes. So when we consider a sentence such as... 

---