Recent research on children’s acquisition of prosody, or the rhythm and melody in language, demonstrates that young children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances to a greater extent than was previously documented. Spoken language, structured by prosodic form, is the primary input on which the mental representations and processes that comprise language use are built. U...

In this paper we examine different approaches to obtain judgments of perceptual prominence. It discusses the use of different scales, the influence of the linguistic level on which the prominence is rated and the normalisation of prominence judgments. We propose the use of a multilevel scale to obtain prominence judgments. It seems that naı̈ve listeners can rate word prominence better than sylla...

Phonetic structures expand temporally and spectrally when they are difficult to predict from their context. To some extent, effects of predictability modulated by prosodic structure. So far, studies on the impact contextual prosody phonetic have neglected dynamic nature speech signal. This study investigates prominence structure first second formants German vowels. We expect find differences in...

Within spontaneous speech there are wide variations in the articulation of the same word by the same speaker. Some words become extremely reduced while others seem to stand out more strongly in a phrase or sentence. This thesis explores these variations in articulation from two different but, arguably, related perspectives, prosodic structure and redundancy. I argue that the constraint of produ...

Cochlear implants (CIs) provide speech perception to adults with severe-to-profound hearing loss, but the acoustic signal remains severely degraded. Limited access to pitch cues is thought to decrease sensitivity to prosody in CI users, but co-occurring changes in intensity and duration may provide redundant cues. The current study investigates how listeners use these cues to infer discourse pr...

Within speech synthesis we often wish to give extra focus to words which carry important information, such as names, dates and amounts. In this paper we look carefully at cost functions that can be used to bias unit selection in favour of hyperarticulated speech in order to give this impression of focus. Hyper-articulated speech tends to be accented, emphatic and requires more articulatory effo...

Linguistic stress and sequential statistical cues to word boundaries interact during speech segmentation in infancy. However, little is known about how the different acoustic components of stress constrain statistical learning. The current studies were designed to investigate whether intensity and duration each function independently as cues to initial prominence (trochaic-based hypothesis) or ...

The present study aims to look at whether Korean English learners’ prosody perception differed from those of native English speakers on the spontaneous English speech. Findings from the study revealed that the Korean English learners significantly differed from the native English speakers in the judgment of prominence while there was no significant group difference in the judgment of boundaries...