The current study investigates the relationship between perceived syllable prominence and the F0 contour in terms of the parameters of a linguistically motivated model of German intonation based on the Fujisaki formula. A subcorpus of the Bonn Prosodic Database was analyzed using the F0 model, and normalized log syllable durations were calculated. Analysis shows that, for accented syllables, pr...

In previous research we showed that the priming paradigm can be used to significantly alter the prominence ratings of subjects. In that study we only looked at the changes in the subjects’ ratings. In the present study, we analyzed the acoustic parameters of the stimuli used in the priming study and investigated the correlation between prominence ratings and acoustic parameters. The results sho...

This study investigates the relationship between sentence prominence and the predictability of word-specific statistical descriptors of prosody. We extend from an earlier wordinvariant model by studying a model that marks words as prominent if the acoustic prosodic features differ from their expected values during the lexemes. To test the approach, the most common acoustic features associated w...

Functionally, gamma-aminobutyric acid receptor (GABAR)-mediated inhibition can be classified as phasic (synaptic) and tonic (extrasynaptic). The GABARs underlying tonic inhibition assemble from subunits different from those responsible for phasic inhibition. We wanted to assess the excitability of hippocampal pyramidal cell (PC) networks following a selective impairment of tonic inhibition. Thi...

We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cos...

This paper describes a first step towards the automatic classification of prominence (as defined by naive listeners). As a result of a listening experiment each word in 500 sentences was marked with a rating scale between ‘0’ (non-prominent) and ‘10’ (very prominent). These prominence labels are compared with the following acoustical features: loudness of each vowel, and F0 range and duration o...

This paper describes the relationships between perceived prominence as a gradual value and some acoustic-prosodic parameters. Prominence is used as an intermediate parameter in a speech synthesis system. A corpus of American English utterances was constructed by measuring and annotating various linguistic, acoustic and perceptual parameters and features. The investigation of the corpus revealed...