Speech is structured into parts by syntactic and prosodic breaks. In locally syntactic ambiguous sentences, the detection of a syntactic break necessarily follows detection of a corresponding prosodic break, making an investigation of the immediate interplay of syntactic and prosodic information impossible when studying sentences in isolation. This problem can be solved, however, by embedding s...

We compare the F0 output and chunking size of speech units of L1 English, TW L2 English and L1 Mandarin to see what some of the major intrinsic prosodic difference could be, what prosodic features could account for TW L2 English and in what way prosodic transfer occurs. Results show that the fundamental prosodic difference of the two languages is how in the pitch domain English requires sharper...

This paper presents a study of prosodic phrasing in a non-tonal dialect of Kammu, a MonKhmer language spoken in Northern Laos. Prosodic phrasing is seen as correlated with syntactic and informational structures, and the description is made referring to these two levels. The material investigated comprises sentences of different lengths and syntactic structures, uttered by seven male speakers. I...

This paper presents a new framework for improved large vocabulary Mandarin speech recognition using prosodic features. The prosodic information is formulated in a probabilistic model well compatible to the conventional maximum a posteriori (MAP) framework for large vocabulary speech recognition. A set of prosodic features considering the special characteristics of Mandarin Chinese is developed,...