In this study we investigate the intonational characteristics of the four utterance types statement, wh-question, yes/no-question and declarative question. Readings of two German scripted dialogues were examined to ascertain characteristic features of the F0 contour for each utterance type. Final boundary tone, nuclear pitch accent, F0 offset, F0 onset, F0 range, and the slopes of a topline and...

The speech-to-song illusion (Deutsch et al., 2011) tracks the perceptual transformation from speech to song across repetitions of a brief spoken utterance. Because it involves no change in the stimulus itself, but a dramatic change in its perceived affiliation to speech or to music, it presents a unique opportunity to comparatively investigate the processing of language and music. In this study...

This paper describes a mechanism for identifying errors made by a student during a computer-aided language learning dialogue. The mechanism generates a set of ‘perturbations’ of the student’s original typed utterance, each of which embodies a hypothesis about an error made by the student. Perturbations are then passed through the system’s ordinary utterance interpretation pipeline, along with t...

AIM Acoustic characteristics associated with varied utterance positions were examined to understand the acoustic consequences of potential articulatory changes near utterance boundaries. METHODS Second formant transition characteristics, including transition duration (ms), transition extent (Hz), and derived slope of transition (Hz/ms), of 12 healthy speakers of American English were examined...

Children's early productions are highly variable. Findings from children's early productions of grammatical morphemes indicate that some of the variability is systematically related to segmental and phonological factors. Here, we extend these findings by assessing 2-year-olds' production of non-morphemic codas using both listener decisions and acoustic analyses. Results showed that utterance po...

Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability at the laryngeal supralaryngeal levels discourse particle euh produced by 10 older French-speaking females two times, years apart. Recognizing multi...

This paper formalizes the communication of agents with modal operators in arrow logic. A communication between agents consists of an agent's utterance and the other agent's perception, thus, both of the utterance and the perception are regarded as parts of a communication channel between agents. Information is regarded as a propositional content of a sentence. An information channel where infor...

The English tenses are often claimed to be deictic, i.e. to make reference to the utterance time and localize some state of affairs relative to it. For instance, the simple past is proposed to convey that the eventuality described in its scope took place at some contextually given time in the past of the utterance time. Let us call the time with respect to which the tenses locate their eventual...