Synthetic speech can indeed be generated without intonation contours or proper prosody, a limitation frequently observed in computer-generated voice technologies where natural rhythm and pitch modulation are missing.
The claim states that synthetic speech can be generated without intonation contours or prosody. Papers [1] and [8] both explicitly confirm that computer-generated or synthetic speech often suffers from a lack of natural prosody and intonation. There are no papers in the retrieved list refuting this fact. Therefore, the balance verdict is SUPPORTED.