The exaggerated intonation and special rhythmic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been hypothesized to attract infant’s attention to the speech stream. However, studies investigating IDS in the context of models of attention are few. A number of such models suggest that surprising or novel perceptual inputs attract attention, where novelty can be operationalized as the statistical...

2. Method In an experimental setting native speakers of American English are asked to read short German stories and repeat short German utterances. During the recording sessions they also produce a number of samples of German spontaneous speech. The recorded utterances are then examined for non−native intonation patterns, which are either obviously inappropriate for German or just to some small...

Those learning foreign languages often experience problems in generating correct intonation. Therefore, several attempts have been made to support the teaching of intonation with the help of devices that display the pitch of speech. This paper deals with the development of a visual intonation-display system. In this system, the visual feedback of intonation is given as a continuous representati...

Modeling speaker-specific intonation is important in several areas, including speaker identification, verification, and imitation using text-to-speech synthesis. However the choice of the intonation model and the estimation of its parameters from spontaneous speech remains a challenge. We propose a way to estimate speaker-specific intonation parameters for a particular superpositional model, th...

538 vocalisations from three domestic cats were collected and used in a phonetic pilot study in order to test some recording and analysis methods normally used with human speech. Based on auditive analysis, the vocalisations were categorised into five types and analysed for duration and F0. The most common type was a combined murmur and miaow. Similar mean type durations were found in all three...

It is argued that a satisfactory global theory of intonation will require four levels of analysis : (i) physical (acoustic, physiological) (ii) phonetic (iii) surface phonological and (iv) deep phonological. The theoretical and cognitive status of each level is discussed and specific proposals are made for a model respecting such an overall architecture as well as a condition of interpretabilit...

This study investigates infants’ discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh En...

Evidence has emerged that older adults find it more difficult to interpret prosodic emotions than younger adults. However, typical tasks involve labelling-related cognitions over and above emotion perception per se. Accordingly, we aimed to determine if age-related difficulty in prosodic emotion labelling extended to discrimination, which is more closely related to emotion perception per se. Fo...

The aim of this study was to investigate the perception of intonation-induced changes in tone in Cantonese. Previous studies have showed that the F0 level and contour of tones are likely to be modified by different intonations. As perception of tones depends primarily on the fundamental frequency (F0) pattern, it is likely that these intonation-induced changes in F0 will affect listeners’ perce...

A number of data-based approaches to intonation modeling represent F0 movements using continuous parameters. This is contradictory to most intonation theories, which suggest that intonation can be modeled with a set of distinct phonological entities that are phonetically realized as F0 movements. This principle has rarely been incorporated into data-based intonation modeling. In this study we c...