Speakers and listeners have been shown to use phonetic cues to help them in tracking the ongoing structure of conversational interaction, but fragmentation between qualitative and quantitative research means that the forms and functions of these cues have been given varying characterizations. The current study explores prosodic variation in contrastive structures in conversational data, using a...

Prosodic patterns provide important cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity, and might be used to improve the accuracy of automatic speech understanding. With this goal, we propose a method of scoring syntactic parses in terms of observed prosodic cues, which can be used in ranking sentence hypotheses and associated parses. Speciically, the score is the probability of acoustic features of a hypo...

Early perceptual processing capabilities are likely to contribute to the categorization of lexical vs. grammatical words by newborns. This lexical categorization could be performed by detecting differences in the prosodic structure of these word categories. We demonstrated that this lexical categorization could be performed using many prosodic cues (duration, F0, energy and formants) automatica...

Highlighting relevant information in a discourse context is a major aim of spoken language communication. Prosodic cues such as focal prominences are used to fulfill this aim through the pragmatic function of prosody. To determine whether listeners make on-line use of focal prominences to build coherent representations of the informational structure of the utterances, we used the brain event-re...

Prosody is an important cue for identifying dialog acts. In this paper, we show that modeling the sequence of acoustic– prosodic values as n-gram features with a maximum entropy model for dialog act (DA) tagging can perform better than conventional approaches that use coarse representation of the prosodic contour through summative statistics of the prosodic contour. The proposed scheme for expl...

In this study, we employed an eye-gaze paradigm to explore whether children (ages 8-12) and adolescents (ages 12-18) with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are able to use prosodic cues to determine the syntactic structure of an utterance. Persons with ASD were compared to typically developing (TD) peers matched on age, IQ, gender, and receptive language abilities. The stimuli were syntactically...

In this paper the prosodic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) narratives will be analyzed in three groups: two groups of native (L1) signers and one group of highly proficient, second language (L2) signers. The results of this study show that the performance in the native hearing, bilingual group is due to both to their ASL language experience, and, under certain conditions, to their exp...

Two visual-world experiments investigated whether and how quickly discourse-based expectations about the prosodic realization of spoken words modulate interpretation of acoustic-prosodic cues. Experiment 1 replicated effects of segmental lengthening on activation of onset-embedded words (e.g. pumpkin) using resynthetic manipulation of duration and fundamental frequency (F0). In Experiment 2, th...

English-learning 7.5-month-olds are heavily biased to perceive stressed syllables as word onsets. By 11 months, however, infants begin segmenting non-initially stressed words from speech. Using the same artificial language methodology as Johnson and Jusczyk (2001), we explored the possibility that the emergence of this ability is linked to a decreased reliance on prosodic cues to word boundarie...

This paper presents a work-in-progress on the automatic analysis of discourse genre in non-elicited speech. The study is focused on the development of bottom-up methods for automatic validation of discourse typologies found in linguistic descriptions (prosodic, syntactic, pragmatic and/or contextual and situational cues). The linguistic classification examined here opposes five discourse genres...