Recommended Readings on Intonation

Beckman, Mary E. 1996. The parsing of prosody, Language and Cognitive Processes 11: 17-67. (Great summary paper of prosody as a linguistic structure, and discussion of the parsing and ambiguities of such structures in speech.)

Beckman, Mary E. and Julia Hirschberg. 1993. The ToBI Annotation Conventions. Unpublished manscript. [http://ling.ohio-state.edu/Phonetics/etobi_homepage.html]. [.pdf][.ps] (Summary of the ToBI labeling scheme, including description of all labels.)

Beckman, Mary E. and Janet B. Pierrehumbert. 1986. Intonational Structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3: 255-309. (Experimental analyses of English and Japanese in which intonational contrasts are investigated.)

Beckman, Mary E. and Gayle Ayers Elam. 1994. Guidelines for ToBI Labelling. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University. Version 3.0 March 1997. [http://ling.ohio-state.edu/Phonetics/etobi_homepage.html]. [.pdf][.ps](The main guide to labeling with ToBI -- easy to read, beginner-friendly, with many MANY examples. We have all the sound/F0 files on-line for you to view while reading this.)

Grice, Martine. 1995. Leading tones and downstep in English. Phonology 12: 183-233. (Discussion of the form and meaning contrast of H+!H* vs. H+L* accents in English.)

Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.) Forthcoming. Prosodic Typology and Transcription: A Unified Approach. (Papers presented at the 1999 ICPhS satellite workshop on "Intonation: Models and ToBI Labeling", San Francisco, California). (Each chapter discusses the intonational phonology of a given language, and describes the ToBI system which has been developed to describe this phonology.)

Liberman, Mark and Janet Pierrehumbert. 1984. Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length. In Aronoff, Mark and Richard T. Oehrle (eds.) Language, Sound, Structure: Studies in Phonology Presented to Morris Halle by His Teacher and Students. pp. 157-233. MIT Press. (Seminal work in the development of the ToBI system. This is the "blueberries, blackberries, brambleberries, ..." paper.)

Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1980. The Phonetics and Phonology of English Intonation. PhD thesis, MIT. (Seminal work upon which the ToBI system is primarily based.)

Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Julia Hirschberg. 1990. The meaning of intonation contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M. E. Pollack (eds.) Intentions in Communication. pp. 271-311. MIT Press. (A proposal of the communicative function and compositionality of pitch accents and boundary tones. This work uses Pierrehumbert's 1980 (pre-ToBI) tonal inventory in its description of intonational meaning.)

Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Shirley A. Steele. 1989. Categories of tonal alignment in English. Phonetica 46: 181-196. (Experimental investigation of the categorical nature of the L+H* vs. L*+H contrast in English.)

Pitrelli, John F., Mary E. Beckman and Julia Hirschberg. 1994. Evalution of prosodic transcription labeling reliability in the ToBI framework. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), pp. 123-126. Yokohama, Japan. (Second study on labeler agreement using ToBI.)

Price, Patti, Mari Ostendorf, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and C. Fong. 1991. The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 90: 2956-2970. (Discusses prosodic "junctures", and their relation to syntactic structures.)

Silverman, Kim, Mary Beckman, John Pitrelli, Mari Ostendorf, Colin Wightman, Patti Price, Janet Pierrehumbert and Julia Hirschberg. 1992. ToBI: A standard for labeling English prosody. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), pp. 867-870. Banff, Canada. (First study on labeler agreement using ToBI.)

van Santen, Jan P. H. and Julia Hirschberg. 1994. Segmental effects on timing and height of pitch contours. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), pp. 719-722. Yokohama, Japan. (Short paper about segmental perturbations, and modeling such effects for speech synthesis.)

Ward, Gregory and Julia Hirschberg. 1985. Implicating uncertainty: The pragmatics of fall-rise intonation. Language 61: 747-776. (Investigation of the L*+H L- H% tune in English.)

Ward, Gregory and Julia Hirschberg. 1988. Intonation and propositional attitude: The pragmatics of L*+H L H%. In ESCOL Proceedings, pp. 512-522. (Experimental investigation of the acoustic cues to the 'uncertainty' vs. 'incredulity' readings of the L*+H L-H% contour.)