This study investigated individual differences in the use of prosodic structure in the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in English, exploring listeners’ sensitivity to the placement of prosodic boundaries in the parsing of relative clauses. Previous work, carried out in the context of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, has shown that variation in “autistic”like personality traits in neurotypical...

This study presents a method for measuring the dynamics of mimicry in conversational speech by means of prosodic cues. It shows that the more speakers are involved in a conversation, the more they intend to mimic each other’s speech prosody. It supports that mimicry in speech is part of social interaction and that it may be implemented into spoken dialogue systems in order to improve their effi...

This paper introduces questions to be discussed in a round-table on "Tone and intonation". Considering the state of the art, we propose the following topics: • Downstep preplanning and downstep patterns • Question prosody and prosodic universals, • Focus prosody and prosodic universals, • "Boundary tones", "intonational tails" and "particles"

This study investigates the relationship between variation due to prosodic prominence and variation due to sound change. We compare two hypotheses: under prominence vowels move in the direction of vowel shift, and under prominence vowels are hyperarticulated, and move to positions more peripheral in the vowel space. These hypotheses make competing predictions for two vowels currently undergoing...

This paper investigates how rising intonation affects the interpretation of cue words in dialogue. Both cue words and rising intonation express a range of speaker attitudes like uncertainty and surprise. However, it is unclear how the perception of these attitudes relates to dialogue structure and belief co-ordination. Perception experiment results suggest that rises reflect difficulty integrat...

This paper reports a study on the structure-prosody interface of embedded restrictive and appositive relative clauses in Dutch and German. The first restrict the class to which the antecedent in the main clause refers, whereas the latter denote an additional property of the antecedent. How this difference is reflected in prosody is topic of investigation. For both languages a perception experim...

In this paper some prosodic research on read and spontaneous speech is introduced first, then the difference between read and spontaneous speech will be depicted, and finally the prosodic labeling system C-ToBI will be described.

In this paper we present the design and development of a modular and scalable speech composer named DEMOSTHeNES. It has been designed for converting plain or formatted text (e.g. HMTL) to a combination of speech and audio signals. DEMOSTHeNES' architecture constitutes an extension to current Text-to-Speech systems’ structure that enables an open set of module-defined functions to interact with ...

On the one hand, these different researchers differ from each other in identifying exactly what the prosodic correlate of topic/theme is. Büring (2002: 27) and Kadmon (2001: 380), following Pierrehumbert (1980), suggest that ‘contrastive topics’ are realized by an entire tune, either H* LH% or L+H*LH%. Steedman (2000) associates his ‘theme’ with the pitch accent L+H*. Gundel & Fretheim (in pres...