It was hypothesized that the retrieval of prosodic and phonemic information from the acoustic signal is facilitated when prosodic information is encoded by co-occurring suprasegmental cues. To test the hypothesis, two-choice speeded classification experiments were conducted, which examined processing interaction between prosodic phrase-boundary vs stop-place information in speakers of Southern ...

Several aspects related to production, as well as natural perception of speech, have gradually been incorporated to automatic speech recognition systems. Nevertheless, the set of speech prosodic characteristics has not been used for the time being in an explicit way in the recognition process itself. In this work, an analysis of the prosody’s three most important parameters: energy, fundamental...

Studies addressing prosodic constituency in French generally agree on two levels of phrasing (accentual phrase, AP, and intonation phrase, IP), while the existence of an intermediate level of phrasing (intermediate phrase, ip) is still controversial. In this study we examine durational cues in a read speech corpus at normal and fast rates in which the target syllable was either adjacent to a pr...

A pilot study was conducted to examine the manner in which Cantonese speakers use prosody to mark syntactic junctures in speech production. Test sentences were designed to create the intended experimental conditions — each sentence-pair consists of an identical array of morphemes with exactly two interpretations according to two different syntactic structures. These structures can be clarified ...

Disfluencies, when present in speech signal, can make syntactic parsing difficult. This difficulty is increased when machines are involved in communication and when speech devices rely on automatic speech recognition techniques. In order to improve automatic speech parsing and thus speech comprehension, methods have been proposed to filter disfluencies out from the speech signal. Attempts have ...

This paper describes a transformationbased learning approach to disfluency detection in speech transcripts using primarily lexical features. Our method produces comparable results to two other systems that make heavy use of prosodic features, thus demonstrating that reasonable performance can be achieved without extensive prosodic cues. In addition, we show that it is possible to facilitate the...

We tested whether adult listeners can simultaneously keep track of variations in pitch and syllable duration in order to segment continuous speech into phrases and group these phrases into sentences. The speech stream was constructed so that prosodic cues signaled hierarchical structures (i.e., phrases embedded within sentences) and non-adjacent relations (i.e., AxB rules within phrases), while...

PURPOSE In this study, the authors sought to understand acoustic and perceptual cues to contrastive stress in speakers with dysarthria (DYS) and healthy controls (HC). METHOD The production experiment examined the ability of 12 DYS (9 male, 3 female; M=39 years of age) and 12 age- and gender-matched HC (9 male, 3 female; M=37.5 years of age) to signal contrastive stress within short sentences...

Speakers with severe dysarthria are known to have reduced range in prosody. Consistent control within that range, however, has largely been ignored. In earlier investigations speakers with severe dysarthria were able to control pitch and duration for sustained vowel production despite reduced flexibility of control (Patel, 1998). The present experiment examined whether 8 speakers with severe dy...

This study addresses the question of the separate contribution of tonal and duration cues in prosodic boundary marking and their effect in syntactic parsing in French. We used pairs of Noun Phrases whose segmental structure was identical but differing in the potential placement of an Accentual Phrase (AP) or Intermediate Phrase (ip) boundary at their right edge. We artificially manipulated the ...