The prosody of a prototypical Norwegian word is characterized by the following properties: (i) it is disyllabic, (ii) the initial syllable is bimoraic and stressed, and (iii) the final syllable is monomoraic and unstressed (Kristoffersen 2000). The weight of the initial syllable can be realized either with a long vowel or by closing the syllable, e.g. with a geminate. Norwegian words can also b...

The present study examines how lexical tone and focus contribute to the formation and alignment of f 0 contours in speech. This was done through an investigation of f 0 contour formation in short Mandarin sentences. These sentences all consisted of "ve syllables with varying tones on the middle three syllables. The sentences were produced by eight Mandarin speakers with four di!erent focus patt...

The duration of speech segments as a function of position in utterances (initial, roedial, final) was studicd. In the first cxpedment seven Engl/sh speakers read nonsense utterances of the form "say a [bab], say a [bgbab], say a [babgb]," etc. Spectragrams were used to determine the duration of speech segments in the readings. Final syllables were found to be longer than nonfinal syllables. F/h...

This paper presents our on­going work to automatically generate lyrics for a given melody, for phonetic languages such as Tamil. We approach the task of identifying the required syllable pattern for the lyric as a sequence labeling problem and hence use the popular CRF++ toolkit for learning. A corpus comprising of 10 melodies was used to train the system to under...

In this paper, we describe some considerations on a speaker-independent word recognition method on a large vocabulary size by the concatenation of syllable templates and a stochastic dynamic time warping method, where syllable templates are taken from spoken words. We got the reference patterns from 216 words uttered by 30 male speakers and recognized the other 200 words uttered by the other 10...

This study compares the tonal structures of stressed penultimate syllables in Quebec French and emphatic stress in the same spoken variety. Two main experiments have been conducted: the first was designed to highlight the tonal characteristics of emphatic stress in read and spontaneous speech. The second was concerned with the phonetic and tonal description of stressed, penultimate syllables as...

In the present study the syllabic organization of utterances from children with DAS is compared to that of normally speaking children by extracting the course of the second formant (F2) across and within syllables. The utterances of children with DAS show more variability within as well as between subjects. There are no syllable boundary effects found in the formant trajectories of either the n...

Data from two varieties of Bamanankan, or Bambara, a Mande language spoken in Mali and surrounding nations, illustrate differences in permissible syllable shapes between the variants. A comparison of the Classic variety of the language spoken in Ségou and that spoken by a younger cohort of individuals in the Malian capital reveals that the latter variety is synchronically developing complex CCV...

Phonemic models of spoken language are incapable of accommodating the patterns of pronunciation variation observed in spontaneous speech (as exemplified by a corpus of American English telephone dialogues, a.k.a. SWITCHBOARD). Variation in pronunciation with respect to segmental identity and duration can be accounted for in terms of a juncture-accent model, in which position of the segment with...

Two approaches to seeking stable patterns in the gestural organization of speech are examined: local organization (individual gestures coordinated with other individual gestures) and global organization (gestures forming larger conglomerates). Articulatory evidence from American English words with a variety of initial consonants and clusters shows that syllable-initial consonants form a global ...