Symbolic versus quantitative descriptions of F 0 contours in German : Quantitative modeling can provide both

The problem of adequately describing F0 contours is far from being solved. Although symbolic representations such as the ToBI-system appear attractive and have been strongly promoted recently, they neither capture F0 contours in a way that permits their reproduction from the labels, a demand resulting from TTS, nor are the labels phonological in the strict sense. The current paper compares results yielded by automatic quantitative modeling with a GToBI-style annotation. On the accent level, a good correlation between tone labels and accent commands can be observed. On the phrase level, most level 3 and 4 break index boundaries are aligned with phrase commands whereas lower level boundaries are presumably marked with durational cues. The results of the study indicate that Fujisaki model parameters, while preserving the F0 contour information, can as well be used for deriving a ToBI-style representation.