Automatic prominence identification and prosodic typology

This paper presents a follow up of a study on the automatic detection of prosodic prominence in continuous speech. Prosodic prominence involves two different prosodic features, pitch accent and stress, that are typically based on four acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (F0) movements, overall syllable energy, syllable nuclei duration and mid-tohigh-frequency emphasis. A careful measurement of these acoustic parameters, as well as the identification of their connection to prosodic parameters, makes it possible to build an automatic system capable of identifying prominent syllables in utterances with performance comparable with the inter-human agreement reported in the literature. This automatic system has been used to cast light on the actual correlation among the acoustic parameters and the prominence phenomenon from an typological point of view, by examining data derived from some stress-accented languages.