Opposite rhythmic principles are responsible for the opposite typological tendencies of the Southeast Asian (Mon-Khmer) and Indlc (Mundal branches of the Austroaslatlc language famBy. The phonological dIvergence between MonKhmer and Munda Is largely the result of stress-timIng In Mon-Khmer and mora-timing In Munda; their vowel phonologies. especially. show how the two branches represent opposit...

In this paper, we provide evidence for rhythmic classifications of speech from duration measurements. Our investigation differs from previous studies in two ways. Firstly, we do not relate speech rhythm to phonological units such as interstress intervals or syllable durations. Instead, we calculate durational variability in successive acoustic-phonetic intervals using Pairwise Variability Indic...

In order to construct a CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) system that can teach learners accent and intonation of Japanese, it's necessary to automatically identify accent types and intonation types in sentence utterances. For this purpose, several acoustic (prosodic) features of speech were investigated taking their effects on human perception into account. For the accent type identifica...

To distinguish Japanese single and geminate stops in twoand three-mora words spoken at varied speaking rates, the ratio of stop closure to the word in native speakers’ production was previously found to be a reliable measure. It was not clear, however, whether the stop closure relates more stably (1) to the entire “word” of any length than just (2) to the moras preceding and following the contr...

This paper summarises the results of an experiment in which speakers produced the same accented target items, occurring in a constant frame sentence, at three speaking rates: Slow, Normal and Fast. The results indicate that the segmental anchoring points of the LHL tone sequence were practically the same at each speaking rate. It can be concluded that the initial L is anchored to the onset of t...

A new method for prosodic word boundary detection in continuous speech was developed based on the statistical modeling of moraic transitions of fundamental frequency (F 0 ) contours, formerly proposed by the authors. In the developed method, F 0 contours of prosodic words were modeled separately according to the accent types. An input utterance was matched against the models and was divided int...

In this paper, to clarify acoustic features for predicting the ends of utterances, we investigated prosodic features that project transition relevance places in Japanese spontaneous conversation. Acoustic parameters used as the prosodic features are the fundamental frequency, power, and mora duration of accentual phrases and words. Results showed that the fundamental frequency and power at the ...

Understanding the business of organizations is a crucial point for developing good information systems supporting the organizations. Different generic business models have been developed based on the language action perspective. There are the models of Action Workflow (Medina-Mora et al, 1992; Denning & Medina-Mora, 1995), DEMO (Dietz, 1999) and BAT (Goldkuhl 1996; 1998). Inspired by these diff...

This paper describes a novel pitch pattern generation method for speech synthesis using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). In the proposed method, the F 0 contours of minor phrase are modeled by HMMs (pitch-HMMs). The pitch-HMMs are trained using F 0 and F 0 considering phonetic environments (e.g. accent type, mora count, mora position, phonemic category, etc.). To evaluate the pitch-HMMs, accent ide...