Prosody impacts the pronunciation variation of lexical items in a number of ways. Accented syllables tend to be pronounced with their canonical (dictionary) vowel. Deaccented vowels are more likely to be reduced. Coarticulatory influences rarely span intonational phrase boundaries. In this work, we investigate the use of automatically generated prosodic hypotheses to improve a weighted dictionary pronunciation model. We use the phonemically transcribed, Buckeye Corpus for this investigation. We find that predictions of pitch accent and intonational phrase boundaries can be used to lower pronunciation model perplexity.

Index Terms: Pronunciation Modeling, Prosody, Prominence, Phrasing