Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are proce...

Although previous research has shown that listeners can use prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken sentences, it is not clear whether naive, untrained speakers in experimental situations ordinarily produce the prosodic cues necessary for disambiguating such sentences. In a series of experiments, the authors found that neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced...

Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: ...

In our efforts to model spontaneous speech for use in, for example, spoken dialogue systems, a series of experiments have been conducted in order to investigate correlates to perceived hesitation. Previous work has shown that it is the total duration increase that is the valid cue rather than the contribution by either of the two factors pause duration and final lengthening. In the present expe...

This paper presents the prosodic analysis of a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese attitudes. Attitudes are separated between the social and propositional categories, and performed either with an assertive or an interrogative modality. Previous studies show the particular relevance of prosodic cues for propositional attitudes, while visual cues are more relevant for social ones. This paper shows tha...

Information extraction from speech is a crucial step on the way from speech recognition to speech understanding. A preliminary step toward speech understanding is the detection of topic boundaries, sentence boundaries, and proper names in speech recognizer output. This is important since speech recognizer output lacks the usual textual cues to these entities (such as headers, paragraphs, senten...

Focus marking is an important function of prosody in many languages. While many phonological accounts concentrate on fundamental frequency (F0), studies have established several additional cues to information structure. However, the relationship between these cues is rarely investigated. We simultaneously analyzed five prosodic cues to focus—F0 range, word duration, intensity, voice quality, th...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between prosodic speech cues and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity, hypothesizing a mutually interactive relationship between the speech characteristics of the psychologist and the child. The authors objectively quantified acoustic-prosodic cues of the psychologist and of the child with ASD during spontaneous interaction, esta...

We investigated the interplay between overt prosodic cues and semantic cues on the structural interpretation of spoken sentences that permit either highor low-attachment of a final relative clause. Prosodic cues were manipulated via the presence or absence of a strong prosodic boundary before the relative clause, and semantic cues were induced via plausibility restrictions (e.g., the servant of...