I investigate the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence and boundary, as they are perceived by naïve listeners, in spontaneous speech from American English (Buckeye corpus). Prosodic prominence and phrasing serve different functions in speech communication: prosodic phrase boundaries demarcate speech chunks that typically cohere semantically, while prominences encode focus and possibly als...

It is well established that in human speech perception the left hemisphere (LH) of the brain is specialized for processing intelligible phonemic (segmental) content (e.g., [1-3]), whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive to prosodic (suprasegmental) cues. Despite evidence that a range of mammal species show LH specialization when processing conspecific vocalizations, the presence of ...

This study examined the perception of linguistic prosody from augmented point-light displays that were derived from motion tracking six talkers producing different prosodic contrasts. In Experiment 1, we determined perceivers’ ability to use these abstract visual displays to match prosody across modalities (audio to video), when the non-matching visual display was segmentally identical and diff...

Perception of charisma, the ability to influence others by virtue of one’s personal qualities, appears to be influenced to some extent by cultural factors. We compare results of five studies of charisma speech in which American, Palestinian, and Swedish subjects rated Standard American English political speech and Americans and Palestinians rated Palestinian Arabic speech. We identify acoustic-...

This study investigates how different prosodic features affect native speakers' naturalness judgement of L2 English speech by Chinese students. Through subjective judgment by native speakers and objectively measured prosodic features, timing and pitch related prosodic features, as well as segmental goodness of pronunciation have been found to play key roles in native speakers' perception of nat...

It has long been known that although words are not separated from each other by pauses in continuous speech, they are demarcated by several prosodic and phonetic cues (Trubetzkoy 1939). Moreover, it has been shown experimentally that listeners are sensitive to these cues (cf., among others, Nakatani & Shaffer 1978; Rietveld 1980; Quené 1991; De Pijper & Sanderman 1994). What has not been shown,...

It is well known that prosodic information is used by infants in early language acquisition. In particular, prosodic boundaries have been shown to help infants with sentence and wordlevel segmentation. In this study, we extend an unsupervised method for word segmentation to include information about prosodic boundaries. The boundary information used was either derived from oracle data (handanno...

Prosodic features in continuous speech provide cues which may be used to disambiguate syntactic ambiguities and to increase the accuracy of speech recognition/understanding systems. This paper presents a novel method using a multivariate statistical framework for producing a model of the relationship between prosodic and syntactic structures in continuous speech. The model can be used for Lingu...