This study investigated cross-modal effects of emotional voice tone (prosody) on face processing during instructed visual search. Specifically, we evaluated whether emotional prosodic cues in speech have a rapid, mandatory influence on eye movements to an emotionally-related face, and whether these effects persist as semantic information unfolds. Participants viewed an array of six emotional fa...

The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical 'pseudo-utte...

Prosodic cues are of great importance in parsing speech signal into prosodic and lexical units. Listeners detect the changes of the prosodic parameters and interpret them to detect sentence modalities or the mood of the speaker. Some automatic speech recognition systems try to use prosodic parameters to detect boundaries of prosodic units and help thus the acoustic decoding process. Although th...

The present paper reports on a listening comprehension test in which the subjects’ task was to decide whether they felt there was an intended causal relation or an intended concessive relation between the conditional clause proposition and the main clause proposition expressed in a set of Norwegian spoken conditionals. In order to do that they had to select a context that would enable them to r...

In this study the local and global prosodic exponents of information structure are examined in the production of six Bulgarian question-answer elicited sentences under different focus conditions (broad focus and non-contrastive and contrastive narrow focus). Local cues are the phonetic properties of the nuclear accented syllables, while global cues reflect broader phonetic patterns in the inter...

The hypothesis that young infants rely on prosodic cues in speech 10 bootstrap their way into syntax has received considerable attention in recent discussions of early language development (e.g., Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau, & Wanner, 1988; Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss, & Kennedy, 1987). The appeal of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis is easy to understand. If the boun...

A grammatical method of combining two kinds of speech repair cues is presented. One cue, prosodic disjuncture, is detected by a decision tree-based ensemble classifier that uses acoustic cues to identify where normal prosody seems to be interrupted (Lickley, 1996). The other cue, syntactic parallelism, codifies the expectation that repairs continue a syntactic category that was left unfinished ...

Previous work examining prosodic cues in online spoken-word recognition has focused primarily on local cues to word identity. However, recent studies have suggested that utterance-level prosodic patterns can also influence the interpretation of subsequent sequences of lexically ambiguous syllables (Dilley, Mattys, & Vinke, Journal of Memory and Language, 63:274-294, 2010; Dilley & McAuley, Jour...

Clinical observations of distortions of production (and perception) of prosody implicate that distinct, non-overlapping neural circuits are responsible for distinct prosodic cues and functions [1]. These observations motivate a question whether similar evidence can be found in the neurologically intact brain. In our experiments we use new technology designed to reveal the function of active, he...

The current study aimed to replicate and expand upon research conducted by Bagley, Abramowitz and Kosson (2009) to examine categorization of emotional sentences among non-psychopathic individuals. 36 monolingual English-speaking undergraduate participants categorized spoken English sentences (produced with neutral prosody but containing semantic cues to emotion) and French sentences (produced w...