High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) is a set of conventions for transcribing/annotating the prosody of speech. 'ToBI' is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing English specifically, but ToBI systems have been defined for a number of other languages, for example J-ToBI refers to the ToBI conventions for Tokyo Japanese.For example, the sentence "Mary went to the store to get some milk" may be produced with a slight break after 'store', indicating that this sentence consists of two smaller units: "(Mary went to the store) (to get some milk)". The English ToBI standard distinguishes four levels of boundary strength, corresponding roughly to breaks between constituents at different levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy. One signal of boundary strength is lengthening of the preceding syllable: the stronger the boundary, the more lengthening of the preceding syllable.
