Fluent dialogue requires that speakers successfully negotiate and signal turn-taking. While many cues to turn change have been proposed, especially in multi-modal frameworks, here we focus on the use of prosodic cues to these functions. In particular, we consider the use of prosodic cues in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese, where variations in pitch height and slope additionally serve to deter...

The current study explores infants! use of prosodic cues coincident with phrases in processing fluent speech. After familiarization with two versions of the same word sequence, both 6and 9-month-olds showed a preference for a passage containing the sequence as a noun phrase over a passage with the same sequence as a syntactic non-unit. However, this result was found only in one of the two group...

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topic units. The approach combines hidden Markov models, statistical language models, and prosody-based decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We evaluate our approach o...

In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing a spoken utterance, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features using a convolutional neural network over energy and pitch trajectories coupled with an attention-based recurrent neural network that accepts text and word...

This paper presents a study of prosodic phrasing in a non-tonal dialect of Kammu, a MonKhmer language spoken in Northern Laos. Prosodic phrasing is seen as correlated with syntactic and informational structures, and the description is made referring to these two levels. The material investigated comprises sentences of different lengths and syntactic structures, uttered by seven male speakers. I...

The current study explores infants’ use of prosodic cues coincident with phrases in processing fluent speech. After familiarization with two versions of the same word sequence, both 6and 9-month-olds showed a preference for a passage containing the sequence as a noun phrase over a passage with the same sequence as a syntactic non-unit. However, this result was found only in one of two groups, t...

The aim of the work to be reported here is to attempt to verify that some dialectal varieties of a restricted area show sensible differences in their prosody and that normally the same differences characterise the prosodic system of speakers when performing sentences in Italian. To verify these hypothesis two kind of experiment were carried out: a perceptual recognition test based on sentences ...

The present research focuses on analyzing and detecting emotions in speech as revealed by task-dependent spoken dialogs corpora. Previously, we have conducted several experiments on a real-life corpus in order to develop a reliable annotation method and to detect lexical and prosodic cues correlated to the main emotion class. In this paper we evaluate both the robustness of the annotation schem...