This study investigated speaker variation in the production of various acoustic cues of prominence, including duration and intensity measures. The Bayesian Information Criterion was used to specify a threshold distinction between cues that are linearly vs. piece-wise linearly predictors of the degree of perceived prominence. For all speakers, some features are linear and some features are discr...

This study investigates the role F0 plays in the perception of prominence in American English. Raw, log and locally normalized measures of F0 were extracted from words in a 35K word corpus of spontaneous speech. Linear regression analyses were conducted to test the strength of these measures as cues to prominence, with prominence based on judgments made by ordinary listeners in real-time audito...

The purpose of this study was to explore the notion of prominence in spoken language. It concentrated on finding an operational definition of prominence, on giving a description of the linguistic and acoustical correlates of prominence, and on analyzing these correlates in terms of their contribution to prominence distinctions. Furthermore, this study was concerned with feature extraction, and ...

We propose a new method for evaluating the readability of simplified sentences through pair-wise ranking. The validity of the method is established through incorpus and cross-corpus evaluation experiments. The approach correctly identifies the ranking of simplified and unsimplified sentences in terms of their reading level with an accuracy of over 80%, significantly outperforming previous resul...

The purpose of this study was to explore the notion of prominence in spoken language. It concentrated on finding an operational definition of prominence, on giving a description of the linguistic and acoustical correlates of prominence, and on analyzing these correlates in terms of their contribution to prominence distinctions. Furthermore, this study was concerned with feature extraction, and ...

We investigate the prominence of English words with stress reversal (e.g. èlevátion 2-1 → élevàtion 1-2). We ask what motivates the occurrence of the “early high” (1-2) pattern outside of stress clash contexts, and consider the hypothesis that it marks prominence non-locally. Experiment 1 tests the effect of prominence pattern on memory. Given its markedness and location at phrasal onset, we hy...

This study investigated the word prominence pattern of Kanakanavu, a critically endangered Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. Previous studies on the phonetic correlates of Piwan and Saisiyat agreed that pitch is the only consistent cue, indicating that Formosan languages are more like pitchaccent languages. However, given that word accents are in a fixed position for those two languages, ...