In this study three different prominence and speech melody related effects on voice quality were studied using an inverse filtering based method. The hypothesis that prominence as a function of sentence and word stress is signaled with more pressed voice quality was tested. The results indicated discrepancies in the parameterization results, and the original hypothesis could not be confirmed. I...

In this report we summarize the approach of examining structural relations between prosody and discourse semantics by means of experimental phonetics.1 We sketch the computational basis of the project, its methodological setting, and we present the results of three experiments on: • the role of local prominence in disambiguation of focal adverbs • the role of relative prominence in anaphora res...

Streefkerk [6] defines prominence as the perceptually outstanding parts in spoken language. An optimal rating scale for syllable prominence has not been found yet. This paper evaluates a 4point, an 11-point, a 31-point, and a continuous scale for the rating of syllable prominence and gives support for scales using a higher number of levels. Priming effects found by Arnold, et al. [1], could onl...

There are several theories regarding what influences prominence assignment in English noun-noun compounds. We have developed corpus-driven models for automatically predicting prominence assignment in noun-noun compounds using feature sets based on two such theories: the informativeness theory and the semantic composition theory. The evaluation of the prediction models indicate that though both ...