Two production studies and one perception study were designed to systematically test F0 alignment and segment duration in Icelandic pitch accents with a view to investigating previous claims about the inventory of distinct intonational categories. Four different conditions were tested: (i) prenuclear pitch accents, (ii) nuclear accents in sentence-final position in sentences with either broad f...

In this paper, we present BioEve a fully automated event extraction system for bio-medical text. It first semantically classifies each sentence to the class type of the event mentioned in the sentence, and then using high coverage hand-crafted rules, it extracts the participants of that event. We participated in Task 1 of BioNLP 2009 Shared task, and the final evaluation results are described h...

Sentence-initial temporal clauses headed by before, as in "Before the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy", have been shown to elicit sustained negative-going brain potentials compared to maximally similar clauses headed by after, as in "After the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy". Such effects may be due to either one of two potential caus...

In this paper I propose an accent placement algorithm that locates accents on adpositions and particles for the use in a Dutch text-to-speech (TTS) system. The algorithm is intended to be a refinement of the rule that accents only content words, which is used in most TTS systems. Before the algorithm is set up, I discuss when adpositions and particles are accented in Dutch. For this empirical r...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a general approach for summarizing the meaning of Vietnamese paragraphs based on simple two-sentences. The studied objects are paragraphs having the common characteristics: the first sentence has one or two nouns indicating human objects; the second sentence has one or two anaphoric pronouns. We only consider two types of Vietnamese human pronouns in th...

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to targe...

For years linguists have noted that intonation patterns and sentence-final discourse particles encode similar meanings across languages (e.g., [23], [21]). Yet the division of labor between the two kinds of systems—and in particular whether there exists a compensatory distribution between them— remains to be clarified. In this article, we focus on two languages within the Romance group (Catalan...

In daily communication, speech is enriched with co-speech gestures, providing a visual context for the linguistic message. It has been shown that older adults are less sensitive to incongruencies between (e.g., sentence) and target final sentence word). This evidenced by smaller delayed N400 (in)congruency effect reflects difference component in response congruent versus incongruent targets. Th...

Cantonese sentence-final particles (SFPs): o Cantonese has more than 30 SFPs. o SFPs express discourse related meanings. o Their functions and meanings are comparable to those expressed by English intonation. o They probably evolved because the complex lexical tone system of Cantonese restricts the use of intonation. o The literature has repeatedly compared the system of SFPs to the system of E...

This study looks at language differences found in the conversations of two groups of Japanese women differentiated by their age. In particular it investigates differences in the strategic use of such aspects of speech as personal pronouns, adverbs, sentence-final particles, and fillers and words of habit. The use of repetition and the lengthening and shortening of sounds are also taken into acc...