To walk 100 meters at 4 kilometers per hour (an average walking pace) takes about 1.5 minutes. What would prevent an oncologist investing this brief time in visiting a patient in the next building? It is not that oncologists as a group are uncaring. I can think of too many examples where the opposite is true. Was he too busy? Was he burned out? Did he feel guilty at having failed to control the...

One major feature of the prosody of Mandarin Chinese speech flow is prosodic phrase grouping [1, 2, and 3]. Phrasal and sentential intonations are governed by a prosody framework that structurally group phrases into a larger/longer and identifiable unit. An overall prosody pattern of such phrase grouping with prosodic specifications is superimposed on phrase group. In turn, individual phrasal i...

Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are proce...

The study explored the perception and acoustic features of prosodic hierarchy boundaries in Uygur and Mandarin Chinese. The results of the perception study showed that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were more sensitive to prosodic hierarchy boundaries than native speakers of Uygur. The results of a detailed acoustic analysis indicated that the acoustic features of Uygur prosodic hierarchy ...