In this study, naïve French listeners’ perceptions of prosody are compared to descriptions of prosodic structure in the literature, and to the results obtained in a similar experiment with American listeners (Cole et al. submitted). Untrained participants listened to recorded spontaneous speech, while following along on an unpunctuated transcript. The listeners were assigned to one of two group...

In this paper we discuss French prosody in the light of language contact. Data of three contact varieties of French are compared with two varieties spoken in monolingual contexts. The data are semi-automatically processed, and three prosodic features are analyzed: metrical weight of the Accentual Phrases (AP), respect of AP formation constraints, and realizations of sandhi phenomena. Rhythmic c...

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners’ processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean li...

This paper introduces a novel model-constrained, data-driven method for generating fundamental frequency contours in Japanese text-to-speech synthesis. In the training phase, the parameters of a command-response F0 contour generation model are learned by a prediction module, which can be a neural network or a set of binary regression trees. The input features consist of linguistic information r...

In this paper, we report on some acoustic data suggesting the existence of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Neapolitan Italian. In late narrow focus utterances in which intonation modality was varied, there was a difference in the shape and slope of the interaccentual region linking the H target of the prenuclear rise with the L target of the following nuclear rise. We hypothesized that such differ...

This paper addresses the relevance of speech rhythm acoustic measures for the description of some standard, regional and contact varieties of French. First, the limitation of conventional speech rhythm measures (e.g. %V, ΔC or PVI) for the description of French regional variations is pointed out. Then, alternative acoustic measures of speech rhythm, based on supra-segmental characteristics asso...

This paper presents a speech segmentation scheme designed to be used in creating voice inventories for speech synthesis. Just the information about phoneme segments in a given speech corpus is not sufficient for speech synthesis, but multi-layers of segments such as breath groups, accent phrases, phonemes, and pitch-marks, are all necessary to reproduce the prosody and acoustics of a given spea...

Earlier impressionistic analyses of Dalabon indicate that the grammatical word is often realized as either an accentual or an intonational phrase, followed by a pause. Unusually, it can also be interrupted by a silent pause, with each section being potentially (although not necessarily) realized as separate intonational phrases. Our analyses of pause duration and pause placement within grammati...

In this paper, we present a study of tonal patterns of Accentual Phrases (APs) in spontaneous speech produced by ten Second Language (L2) speakers of Norwegian. The speakers are multilingual, and their dominant language is either Lingala or Swahili. Analyses of 1000 APs (100 per speaker) show that all the speakers produce the expected lexical pitch accent in a significant majority of the cases....

According to the traditional phonological literature, regressive voicing assimilation in obstruent clusters is an obligatory categorical, completely neutralising process in Hungarian, as long as no major prosodic boundary signalised by a longer pause intervenes between the target and the trigger. In the present experiment, the effect of minor prosodic boundaries, i.e. accentual phrases (AP) on ...