A method for predicting parametric vocoder parameter includes receiving a text utterance having one or more words, each word having one or more syllables, and each syllable having one or more phonemes. The method also includes receiving, as input to a vocoder model, prosodic features that represent an intended prosody for the text utterance and a linguistic specification. The prosodic features include a duration, pitch contour, and energy contour for the text utterance, while the linguistic specification includes sentence-level linguistic features, word-level linguistic features for each word, syllable-level linguistic features for each syllable, and phoneme-level linguistic features for each phoneme. The method also includes predicting vocoder parameters based on the prosodic features and the linguistic specification. The method also includes providing the predicted vocoder parameters and the prosodic features to a parametric vocoder configured to generate a synthesized speech representation of the text utterance having the intended prosody.