In part I of this post we looked at the three most basic tones in English and we checked out the performance of the text-to-speech, or TTS, robot at AT&T Labs named “Mike”. We discovered that English does in fact have tones. And we discovered that tones are hard to get right in text-to-speech.
In this post we look at a different example of vocal inflection in English. And we see how tones interact with sentences. Listen to examples #1a and b, below.
Example #1a (falling then rising): “You downloaded the newest vèrsion, didn’t you?”
Example #1b (falling then falling again): “You downloaded the newest version, didn’t you?”
(The examples here follow the presentation of local meanings of rising [...]