Perceptual prominence is an important indicator of a word’s and syllable’s lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic status in a discourse. Its automatic annotation would be a valuable enrichment of large databases used in unit selection speech synthesis and speech recognition. While much research has been carried out on the interaction between prominence and acoustic factors, little progress ...

Prominence has been widely studied on the word level and the syllable level. An extensive study comparing the two approaches is missing in the literature. This study investigates how word and syllable prominence relate to each other in German. We find that perceptual ratings based on the word level are more extreme than those based on the syllable level. The correlations between word prominence...

The present study investigates the acoustic manifestation and phonological nature of prominences induced by dual and multiple focuses in Standard Chinese (hereinafter SC). Results show that double focus exerted two prominences in the target sentence and these two prominences performed similar acoustic manifestations. However, under a multiple focus condition, only the rightmost focused constitu...