This paper presents a comparison study concerning the level of naturalness of the manipulated Persian intonation based on AM and PENTA models of speech prosody. In this piece of study, the implementation rules in accordance with the aimed approaches are based on the pitch contours analyses. Intonation is used in all languages and it is linguistically structured and pragmatically meaningful. PENTA model is based on communicative and functional view of speech. AM model reflects the connection between two subsystems of phonology and views tone on separate tiers. A corpus containing 15 sentences was created with different types of focus on the content words. In production level, 12 male and female native speakers of Persian participants were assigned to produce and record the sentences. The data were analyzed and resynthesized via PRAAT software manually. Finally, 10 Persian native speakers were selected to judge the naturalness of the manipulated sounds of both AM and PENTA Models. After accomplishing the perception level, based on the quantitative results obtained from a chi-squared test (xi2) analyses, we argue that firstly, there is a significant difference between the natural speech intonation produced by the control group and the sampling groups. Although, the other test was conducted on two sampling groups comparing AM and PENTA models. The obtained results of its xi2 test indicated no significant difference between the Persian manipulated speech intonation based on Autosegmental-metrical approach parameters and PENTA.

Authors:
Fatemeh Lotfi, International University of Imam Khomeini, Iran
Vahid Sadeghi, International University of Imam Khomeini, Iran

About the Presenter(s)
I, Fatemeh Lotfi, am a graduate MA student from IKIU,Iran. I have conducted a comparative research on speech intonation synthesis. I have been teaching EFL students and leading tours for 11 years. Currently, I am doing research on spontaneous speech.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatemeh-lotfi-39a2971b3

Additional website of interest
https://www.instagram.com/english_in_evaland

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