Williams syndrome (WS) is a unique genetic developmental disorder characterized by excessive social behaviour accompanied by exaggerated prosody. While past studies with off-line assessment of prosodic skills report significant delays in prosodic skills in individuals with WS as compared to typically developing controls, reports typically lack speech analysis. The current study, using a speech ...

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between a and b in aXb) in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. The princess is kiss ing the frog). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render them distinct from lexical elements. We use an artificial grammar learning experiment with adults ...

The following study aims at examining prosodic thresholds of perception for Spanish, parting from the algorithm analysis offered by Prosodic Analysis Speech (PAS) model Cantero (2019). approach is based on defining values each syllable after a process standardization, relativizing value associated with to that preceding one. As threshold in case melody was defined as 10% Spanish (FONT-ROTCHÉS; ...

The forms, functions, and organization of sounds and utterances are generally the focus of speech communication research; little is known, however, about how the silence between speaker turns shades the meaning of the surrounding talk. We use an experimental protocol to test whether listeners’ perception of trouble in interaction (e.g., disagreement or unwillingness) varies when prosodic cues a...

We investigate whether 8-month-old infants can detect prosodic cues relevant in sentence structuring. We recorded event-related potentials to examine online responses to the processing of prosodic boundaries. Prior studies in adults have validated the closure positive shift as reflecting prosodic boundary perception during speech processing. The current study shows that in the event-related pot...

Previous studies have shown that visual only perception of prosodic contrastive focus in French is possible. The aim of this study was to determine whether the visual modality could be combined to the auditory one and lead to a perceptual enhancement of prosodic focus. In order to examine this question, we carried out auditory only, audiovisual and visual only perception tests. In order to avoi...

Disfluencies occur frequently in spontaneous speech. Detection and correction of disfluencies can make automatic speech recognition transcripts more readable for human readers, and can aid downstream processing by machine. This work investigates a number of knowledge sources for disfluency detection, including acoustic-prosodic features, a language model (LM) to account for repetition patterns,...

Syntactic and discourse boundaries are signalled by prosodic cues as well as linguistic cues in speech. We investigated whether there is a correspondence between prosodic or linguistic cues and the boundary strengths. We measured the rates of filled pauses (FPs) and conjunctions, and the durations of silent and filled pauses and conjunctions at four types of boundaries in casual presentations i...

EP listeners seem to pay attention to phonetic detail specificities of the speech signal, which allow them to start building their internal representation of the intonation contour very early in the sentence. Using the Gating Paradigm methodology (Grosjean 1980, 1996), 20 European Portuguese (EP) native speakers were presented with auditory speech stimuli gated in specific sentence locations, w...

Phonological accounts of speech perception postulate that listeners map variable instances of speech to categorical features and remember only those categories. Other research maintains that listeners perceive and remember subcategorical phonetic detail. Our study probes memory to investigate the reality of categorical encoding for prosody—when listeners hear a pitch accent, what do they rememb...