Introduction Speech prosody refers to melodic or suprasegmental features of an utterance (e.g., pitch) that may signal a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic functions (Lehiste, 1996). Over the last quarter century, increasing attention has been focused on the roles of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in the processing of prosodic information. Evidence has been steadily acc...

Automatic speaker nativeness assessment has multiple applications, such as second language learning and IVR systems. In this paper we view this as a regression problem, since the available labels are on a continuous scale. Multiple approaches were applied, such as phonotactic models, i-vectors, and goodness of pronunciation, covering both segmental and suprasegmental features. Different phonota...

One of the interesting topics on multimedia domain is concerned with empowering computer in order to speech production. Speech synthesis is granting human abilities to the computer for speech production. Data-based approach and process-based approach are the two main approaches on speech synthesis. Each approach has its varied challenges. Unit-selection speech synthesis and statistical parametr...

The Estonian three-way quantity system is usually described by a robust foot-level compensatory mechanism of the stressed and the unstressed syllable durations. Beneath the three-way foot-level contrast, the quantity oppositions can be realized by seven different segmental combinations of the initial vowel and the following intervocalic consonant length. In this work we investigated the effects...

This study considers the pronunciation of Japanese learners of English. Its first intent is to offer a brief overview of Japanese phonological and prosodic features to highlight anticipated L1 transfer issues in spoken English output. It then explores the segmental and suprasegmental aspects of a short recorded performance by two intermediate Japanese learners of English against a sample of Rec...

Cross-linguistically, focus is often cued by suprasegmental features and changes in phrasing. In this paper, phonetic and phonological markers of contrastive focus in Korean are investigated. We find that, as a phonological marker, focus initiates an accentual phrase (AP), and tends to, but does not always, include the following words in the same AP. But regardless of whether the post-focus seq...

This paper presents a new version of the pronunciation software program WinPitch LTL. This completely redesigned version is much more easier to use by the teacher and learner alike, and contains the regular function of prosodic real time display, variable speed playback, prosodic morphing, on screen teacher comment display, etc. New features include video capabilities (the program can process m...

To compensate for the variability in native English intonation and the unpredictability of nonnative speech, we propose a new method of assessing nonnative intonation without any prior knowledge of the target text or phonetics. After recognition of tone events with HMMs and a bigram model of intonation, we define an utterance’s automatic intonation score as the mean of the posterior probabiliti...