Improving Speech Synthesis by Using a Cognitive View on F0 Contours

The paper presents a cognitive perspective on information structure (IS) of utterances. The cognitive approach of IS is based on the hypothesis that the neural activity which structures the auditory objects before they are converted into speech constituents modulates the F0 frequency of the related speech output. Section II presents the set of functional categories of the cognitive IS model, including the category of nuclear elements and the rules for their identification within F0 contours.In section III, the F0 contours of two English utterances are presented by showing how their cognitive/prosodic structure supports the syntactic and semantic functional elements. Two other utterances of the same sentences were synthesized by using Google Translate and their F0 contours are also presented in the paper by assigning them to two possible cognitive descriptions. The aim of the paper is to conclude in what extent the synthesized intonations without cognitive modelling support the syntactic and semantic functions of constituents, and to show how cognitive descriptions can drive speech synthesis to adapt the intonation to the message of input sentences.