Previous research suggests that intonation is a particularly challenging aspect of L2 speech learning. While most research focuses on speech production, we widen the focus and study the perception of intonation by L2 learners. We investigate whether advanced German learners of English have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in a narrative context with different sentence ty...

A sinusoidal replica of a sentence evokes a clear impression of intonation despite the absence of the primary acoustic correlate of intonation, the fundamental frequency. Our previous studies employed a test of differential similarity to determine that the tone analog of the first formant is a probable acoustic correlate of sinusoidal sentence intonation. Though the typical acoustic and percept...

This study explores the intonational signalling of a ‘request address’ in German and Swedish. Data from 16 speakers (9 Germans, 7 Swedes) were elicited under controlled conditions, and intonation contours produced on the test phrase “Wallander?” were classified according to their phrase-final pattern. Both ‘rises’ and ‘fall-rises’ were produced frequently by both Germans and Swedes, which is in...

This study’s aim is to predict speaker personality from intonation patterns in spoken dialogs. Intonation patterns were extracted by a parametric superpositional stylization approach that allows for pattern description on a parametric as well as on a categorical level. Based on features derived from these representations we trained support vector machines and fitted generalized linear regressio...

the polysemy and lexical similarity of the linguistic structures may lead to ambiguity in the speech and latency. but since a language needs to be away from this deficiency so as to be functional and useful, it needs to be cleansed from such meaning latencies based on the available indications. one indication that can be categorized among the verbal indications is the sentence intonation. by ch...

PURPOSE This paper examined the production of intonation patterns in children with developmental dysarthria associated with cerebral palsy (CP) prior to and after speech intervention focussing on respiration and phonation. The study further sought to establish whether intonation performance might be related to changes in speech intelligibility. METHOD Intonation patterns were examined using c...

A hand-labelled Pashto speech data set containing spontaneous conversations is analysed in order to propose an intonational inventory of Pashto. Basic intonation patterns observed in the language are summarised. The relationship between pitch accent and part of speech (PoS), which was also annotated for each word in the data set, is briefly addressed. The results are compared with the intonatio...

It has been shown in the literature that cross-linguistically, the other-initiated repair element ‘huh’ is typically realised with rising intonation. Icelandic has exceptional status in this respect in that it has falling intonation with Ha [haː] ‘huh’. The literature claims that it is language-specific interrogative prosody that accounts for this exceptional status of Icelandic. More specifica...

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (). We test this idea by presenting intonation contours for ...