The local speech rate is one of the important prosodic parameters for representing both linguistic and paralinguistic information. The present paper presents a command-response model for the process of speech rate contorl, and applies it to the analysis of the effects of emphasis on the local speech rate in English utterances. It shows that the local speech rate as a function of time can be approximated by the smoothed response of a second-order linear system for speech rate control to a set of underlying commands, whose timings and amplitudes serve a quantitative parameters for representing paralinguistic informaiton. Together with the command-response model for F_0 contour generation, it provides a unified approach to the quantitative anlaysis of paralinguistic information in prosody.
展开▼
