Prosodic features of the speech signal include fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and duration. In order to study the development of prosody independent from segmental aspects of speech, we considered the question–statement contrast. In English, adults mark the contrast using changes in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity, with F0 being the most prominent cue. Declarative questions...

Prosodic structure has long been known to constrain phonological processes [1]. More recently, it has also been recognized as a source of fine-grained phonetic variation of speech sounds. In particular, segments in domain-initial position undergo prosodic strengthening [2, 3], which also implies more resistance to coarticulation in higher prosodic domains [5]. The present study investigates the...

We sought to better understand how normal speakers signal the yes-no question-statement contrast and whether speakers with severe speech impairment could signal the contrast and how they would do so. We asked a group of eight speakers with severe dysarthria to produce ten, three-syllable phrases in an interrogative tone and in a declarative tone. We asked a group of gender matched normal speake...

Potential visual prosodic cues for prominence and phrasing comprising eyebrow movements were manipulated using a system for audio-visual text-to-speech synthesis which has been implemented based on the KTH rule-based synthesis. Two functions of prosody (prominence and phrasing) were tested in two separate experiments. A test sentence, ambiguous in terms of an internal phrase boundary, was used ...

This paper introduces an unsupervised prosody labeling method for preparing a large speech corpus used in developing a Mandarin Text-to-Speech system. Adopting a four-layer prosody hierarchy, the proposed method performs an unsupervised segmental clustering that iteratively segments spoken utterances into strings of prosodic constituents and models the patterns of the segmented prosodic constit...

This paper investigates the prosodic patterns of non-lexical response tokens in a Swedish call-in radio show. The feedback of a professional speaker was investigated to give insight in how to build a simulated active listener that could encourage its users to continue talking. Possible domains for such systems include customer care and second language learning. The prosodic analysis of the non-...

BACKGROUND The accurate perception of prosody assists a listener in deriving meaning from natural speech. Few studies have addressed the ability of cochlear implant (CI) listeners to perceive the brief duration prosodic cues involved in contrastive vowel length, word stress, and compound word and phrase identification. PURPOSE To compare performance in the perception of brief duration prosodi...

Researchers have established a relationship between beginning readers' silent comprehension ability and their prosodic fluency, such that readers who read aloud with appropriate prosody tend to have higher scores on silent reading comprehension assessments. The current study was designed to investigate this relationship in two groups of high school readers: Specifically Poor Comprehenders (SPCs...

Previous studies on the perception of language prosody and dialectal prosody have shown that languages and regional dialects can be identified by prosodic cues alone. This pilot study tests this for 4 Swiss German dialects. 70 subjects are presented with filtered speech material, devoid of segmental cues. The filter was applied for frequencies between 250 Hz7000 Hz. Despite this filtering, 3 of...

This paper presents a statistical model, which associates syntactic rules with prosodic cues in order to help a continuous speech recognition system produce sentence hypotheses. The system consists of the sequential coupling of a standard speech recognizer and a syntactic parser working on lattices of hypotheses by means of a Stochastic Context -Free Grammar (SCFG). The prosodic/syntactic model...