Speech Prosody

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Overview

Speech prosody concerns the patterns of pitch, stress, rhythm, duration, and pausing that shape how speech is understood. Researchers analyze acoustic contours and phonological annotations, probe self-supervised speech representations, and build neural systems that predict or control prosodic features in tasks such as text-to-speech, tone recognition, and pronunciation assessment. Evaluation spans multilingual stress and tone tests, emotional speech perception, dialogue and translation, and comparisons with human judgments. A central challenge is that models may encode prosodic cues without reliably using or reproducing them, especially when fine-grained meaning depends on context, language, or speaker.

Latest papers

CardsList

80 papers10 papers in the last four weeks, down 23% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. The interface of intonation and lexical tone: Boundary phenomena in Mandarin varieties

    Aug 5, 2026Cong Zhang, Yiya ChenSpeech Prosody

  2. Correlation between prosody and pragmatics: A case study of the discourse marker hālā `now' in Persian

    Jul 30, 2026Soleiman Ghaderi, Moloud Asakereh, Kevin TangSpeech Prosody

    Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran · Department of English Language and Linguistics, Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany

  3. StellarTTS: Sparse Temporal Embedding for Low-Latency and Robust Speech Synthesis

    Jul 22, 2026Kaicheng Luo, Xuefei Gong, Yutao Sun +6TTS SynthesisSpeech Prosody

    Honor Device Co., Ltd., China · Auditory Cognition and Computational Acoustics Lab MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  4. A Situational Speech Synthesizer for Yoruba: System Design, Phonological Rule Architecture, and Orthographic Extensions for Contour

    Jul 17, 2026Kola Tubosun, Adedayo Oluokun, Hafiz Adewuyi +1TTS SynthesisLow-Resource TTS Synthesis

  5. Self-supervised Speech Comparison for L2 Phone, Rhythm, and Intonation Scoring

    Jul 15, 2026Stephen McIntosh, Reuben Smit, Daisuke Saito +2Dynamic Time WarpingSpeech Processing

    The University of Tokyo, Japan · Stellenbosch University, South Africa

  6. SAMPA: Transformer-based segmentation of prosodic boundaries in Brazilian Portuguese

    Jul 8, 2026Rodrigo de Freitas Lima, Julio Cesar Galdino, Marcos Vinicius TrevisoSpeech ProsodySpeech Language Models

    ICMC University of São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil · Instituto Superior Técnico University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal

  7. WordVoice: Explicit and Decoupled Multi-Dimensional Word-Level Control for LLM-Based TTS

    Jul 7, 2026Sihang Nie, Jinxin Ji, Xiaofen Xing +4TTS SynthesisSpeech Prosody

    South China University of Technology · Huya Inc. · Tongji University +2

  8. Using embeddings to predict spoken word duration and pitch in Mandarin monosyllabic words

    Jul 2, 2026Xiaoyun Jin, Mirjam Ernestus, R. Harald BaayenSpeech ProcessingSpeech Prosody

    Quantitative Linguistik, University of Tuebingen, Germany · Center for Language Studies, Radboud University, 6525 HT Nijmegen, The Netherlands

  9. Reference-Based Prosody and Rhythm Evaluation for Spoken Dialogue Systems

    Jun 30, 2026Ashish Hallur, Thomas Thebaud, Georgi Tinchev +2Voice Agent EvaluationSpeech Generation Evaluation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA · Amazon Inc., Seattle, WA, USA

  10. HPRO: Hierarchical Progressive Reward Optimization via Preference Extraction for Emotional Text-to-Speech

    Jun 26, 2026Sihang Nie, Xiaofen Xing, Rui Xing +5Reward ModelingSpeech Prosody

    South China University of Technology, China · Huya Inc., China · Tongyi Fun Team, Alibaba Group, China +1

  11. Do Speech Emphasis Models Generalize across Languages and Emotions?

    Jun 26, 2026Megan Wei, Deepali Aneja, Jiaqi Su +3Speech ProsodyCross-Lingual Transfer

    Adobe Research, USA · Brown University, USA

  12. Phonetic and semantic analyses of spoken corpora of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin indicate that the neutral tone is a lexical tone

    Jun 24, 2026Yuxin Lu, Zhexuan Li, R. Harald BaayenSpeech Prosody

    Quantitative Linguistics, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

  13. Adaptive Oscillatory Inductive Bias for Modeling Sharp Prosodic Dynamics in Diffusion-Based TTS

    Jun 24, 2026Sandipan Dhar, Nirmesh J. Shah, Ashishkumar P. Gudmalwar +1TTS SynthesisAudio Diffusion Models

    Media Analysis, Sony Research India

  14. Synthesizing the Lombard Effect: Multi-Level Control of Speech Clarity and Vocal Effort in TTS

    Jun 22, 2026Seymanur Akti, Alexander WaibelTTS SynthesisSpeech Prosody

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany · KIT Campus Transfer (KCT), Germany · Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA

  15. ProsoCodec: Prosody-Oriented Speech Codec for Voice Conversion

    Jun 20, 2026Jeongsoo Choi, Ji-Hoon Kim, Shujie Hu +1Audio Representation LearningNeural Audio Codecs

    KAIST, South Korea · Chung-Ang University, South Korea · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

  16. LLM-Based Multi-Reference Evaluation for Efficient and Robust Assessment of Phrase Break Annotations

    Jun 19, 2026Younghan Park, Hoyeon Lee, Hawon Jeong +1Speech ProsodyAutomated Evaluation

    NAVER Cloud, South Korea · Yonsei University, South Korea · KAIST AI, South Korea

  17. PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

    Jun 18, 2026Masaya Kawamura, Yuma Shirahata, Kentaro Mitsui +1Speech Quality AssessmentSpeech Prosody

    LY Corporation, Japan

  18. MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

    Jun 16, 2026Subhankar Ghosh, Jason Li, Paarth Neekhara +4TTS SynthesisSpeech Prosody

    NVIDIA Corporation, USA

  19. Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models

    Jun 16, 2026James Kirby, Ioana Krehan, Michele GubianSupervised Fine-TuningSpeech Prosody

    Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU Munich, Germany

  20. Dynamic Prosody Prediction in LLM-based TTS for Improving Speaker Similarity

    Jun 13, 2026Zhenwei Mou, Liping Chen, Yajun Hu +3TTS SynthesisSpeech Prosody

    University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui, China · iFLYTEK, Anhui, China

  21. NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

    Jun 11, 2026Dongwook Lee, Youngho Cho, Sangkwon Park +2Speech TranslationSimultaneous Speech Translation

    IPAI and 2ECE, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, Korea · 2ECE, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, Korea · Department of AI, University of Seoul, Seoul, 02504, Korea

  22. PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

    Jun 11, 2026Wen Zhang, Xiaocui Yang, Zhuoyue Gao +3Multi-Agent LLM SystemsSpoken Dialogue Systems

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China

  23. What Makes Synthetic Speech Sound Sarcastic? A Prosody-Controlled Perception Study

    Jun 8, 2026Zhu Li, Shekhar Nayak, Matt ColerSpeech Prosody

    Speech Technology Lab, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

  24. ProSarc: Prosody-Aware Sarcasm Recognition Framework via Temporal Prosodic Incongruity

    Jun 4, 2026Prathamjyot Singh, Ashima Sood, Sahil Sharma +1Audio UnderstandingSpeech Prosody

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, India · School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Ulster University, Londonderry, United Kingdom · School of Computing, Ulster University, Belfast, United Kingdom

  25. Task-Vector Arithmetic for Emotional Expressivity Control in Language-Model-Based Text-to-Speech

    Jun 3, 2026Daniel Oliveira de Brito, Arnaldo Candido JuniorTTS SynthesisSpeaker Embedding

    Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP) São José do Rio Preto, SP, Brazil

  26. Why We Need Speech to Evaluate Speech Translation

    May 27, 2026Maike Züfle, Danni Liu, Vilém Zouhar +1Speech TranslationSpeech Prosody

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology · ETH Zurich

  27. Bridging the Gap: Converting Read Text to Conversational Dialogue

    May 18, 2026Parshav Singla, Agnik Banerjee, Aaditya Arora +5TTS SynthesisSpeech Prosody

    Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, India · Samsung Research and Development Institute, Bangalore, India

  28. A Survey of Automated Presentation Coaching: Systems, Methods, and Open Challenges

    May 11, 2026Wen Liang, Li Siyan, Zackary Rackauckas +1Speech Prosody

    Columbia University, USA · RoleGaku, USA

  29. Minimizing Modality Gap from the Input Side: Your Speech LLM Can Be a Prosody-Aware Text LLM

    May 7, 2026Wenqian Cui, Xiao-Hui Li, Daxin Tan +2Audio UnderstandingSpeech Prosody

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Huawei Technologies

  30. DiffAnon: Diffusion-based Prosody Control for Voice Anonymization

    Apr 29, 2026Ismail Rasim Ulgen, Zexin Cai, Nicholas Andrews +2Audio Diffusion ModelsSpeech Prosody

    Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, USA · Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (COE), Johns Hopkins University, USA