Phonetic manifestation of paralinguistic information (PI) like speaker’s attitude and intention is a unique property of speech communication. Production and perception of six PI types were examined using Japanese. In speech production, acoustic and articulatory analyses revealed that speech signal and the underlying articulatory gesture differed systematically and considerably under the specifi...

Many experimental methods seek to minimize phonetic variation, hoping to spare linguistic information and eliminate the paralinguistic, the idiosyncratic and the ”merely” expressive [3]. A conventional technique (phonetic vice clamps) is the use of a frame such as ”say X again” , familiar from many studies. Typically, the underlying assumption is that utterance-to-utterance variability stems fr...

We present computational models based on visual attention that learn object-name mappings and action semantics from simple 2D multi-agent visual streams co-occurring with word-separated utterance streams. We use no perceptual priors and the nominals are acquired by an early learner who has no syntactic knowledge. A late learner then uses the knowledge of nominals to identify actions referring t...

Utterances are comprised of words belonging to various syntactic classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.). The arrangement of these words follows precise syntactic rules, specified in the Grammar of the language. Words are organized into syntactic constituents, and syntactic constituents are organized into a hierarchical tree-like syntactic structure. For example, in the utterance "the little g...

Speakers can be taken to be committed to utterance content even when that content is contributed in the scope of an entailment-canceling operator, like negation (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). We develop a probabilistic model of this phenomenon, called ‘projection’, that relies on the prosodic realization of utterances. We synthesize existing theoretical claims about prosody, informa...

This study uses the multi-level coding of a designed corpus of unscripted task-oriented dialogues to demonstrate that time to respond (Inter-Move Interval, IMI) and rate of disfluency behave like psycholinguistic measures, reaction time and error rate, in reflecting the speakers’ cognitive burdens. Multiple-regression analyses show that IMI is sensitive to social distance between interlocutors,...

Phrase accents, one of the three tonal categories assumed by much recent research on intonation, are expected to associate with a prosodic boundary (e.g. the end of the utterance) but not to phonetically align with a specific tone-bearing unit (TBU), such as a stressed syllable. This paper presents experimental evidence on the intonation of Cypriot Greek polar questions suggesting that phrase a...

This experiment seeks to determine the extent to which the variation of temporal characteristics of stops in a particular Spanish utterance spoken by an English speaker had a noticeable effect on the perception of foreigness of speech. The experiment was conducted by manipulating an utterance with special computer programs and using native subjects to rate the manipulated utterances as being mo...

Chatter bots are computer programs that can simulate a conversation through text chat. Current chatter bots perform well in artificial conversations consisting of pairs of utterance exchanges like a questionanswer session where the context switches with every pair. But they perform poorly in longer conversations where the context is maintained across several utterance exchanges. Existing approa...

This paper explores the relationship between perceived syllable prominence and the acoustic properties of a speech utterance. It is aimed at establishing a link between the linguistic meaning of an utterance in terms of sentence modality and focus with its underlying prosodic features. Our acoustic analysis compares traditional parameters modified by focus and sentence mode like fundamental fre...