This study provides a direct comparison of boundary and prominence perception strategies between Japanese EFL learners and native speakers of English using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) method. Although RPT experiments are available for both native English speakers [1], [2], [3] and Japanese EFL learners [4], a direct comparison of the available data is problematic as the stimuli sets u...

We propose an unsupervised prominence prediction method for expressive speech synthesis. Prominence patterns are learned by statistical analysis of prosodic features extracted from speech data. The advantages of our unsupervised datadriven prominence prediction include: easy adaptation to new speakers, speech styles, and even languages without requiring expert knowledge or complicated linguisti...

This study investigated speaker variation in the production of various acoustic cues of prominence, including duration and intensity measures. The Bayesian Information Criterion was used to specify a threshold distinction between cues that are linearly vs. piece-wise linearly predictors of the degree of perceived prominence. For all speakers, some features are linear and some features are discr...

This study investigates the role F0 plays in the perception of prominence in American English. Raw, log and locally normalized measures of F0 were extracted from words in a 35K word corpus of spontaneous speech. Linear regression analyses were conducted to test the strength of these measures as cues to prominence, with prominence based on judgments made by ordinary listeners in real-time audito...

The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend occur more predictable environments are shorter than less environments. One account the informativity effect on is acoustic details probabilistic reduction stored as part word's mental representation. Other research argued effects tied ...

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-proso...

This study was designed to test the iambic/trochaic law, which claims that elements contrasting in duration naturally form rhythmic groupings with final prominence, whereas elements contrasting in intensity form groupings with initial prominence. It was also designed to evaluate whether the iambic/trochaic law describes general auditory biases, or whether rhythmic grouping is speech or language...

This work aims to improve text-to-speech synthesis for Wikipedia by advancing and implementing models of prosodic prominence. We propose a new system architecture with explicit prominence modeling and test the first component of the architecture. We automatically extract a phonetic feature related to prominence from the speech signal in the ARCTIC corpus. We then modify the label files and trai...

We investigate the prominence of English words with stress reversal (e.g. èlevátion 2-1 → élevàtion 1-2). We ask what motivates the occurrence of the “early high” (1-2) pattern outside of stress clash contexts, and consider the hypothesis that it marks prominence non-locally. Experiment 1 tests the effect of prominence pattern on memory. Given its markedness and location at phrasal onset, we hy...

0. Introduction This study examines the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence as perceived by a large number of native listeners of American English who are naïve to the phonetics and phonology of prosody. In English, as in other stress languages, speech utterances are chunked into smaller prosodic phrases, and within a prosodic phrase some words are assigned phrasal stress, which typicall...