English and Chinese have stark differences in both segmental and suprasegmental features. In particular, for Chinese learners of English as a secondary language (L2), there are expected deviations in the production of English prosody as a result of transfer of linguistic characteristics from their mother tongue. We have designed, collected and annotated a corpus to elicit suprasegmental informa...

The Chinese writing system provides an excellent case for testing the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information in reading words aloud within the same language. In logographic Chinese characters, neither segmental nor tonal information is explicitly represented, whereas in Pinyin, an alphabetic transcription of the character, both are explicitly represented. Two primed naming exp...

In order to cope with the problems of spontaneous speech (including, for example, hesitations and non-words) it is necessary to extract from the speech signal all information it contains. Modeling of words by segmental units should be supported by suprasegmental units since valuable information is represented in the prosody of an utterance. We present an approach to exible and eecient modeling ...

In four reading aloud experiments we investigated the operations occurring at the level of the phonological buffer by manipulating stress and phoneme information. In all experiments we adopted a masked priming paradigm with three-syllable Italian word targets. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the effect of pure segmental (e.g., fe%%%% - FEcola) and pure suprasegmental (CInema - FEcola) overlap, respe...

This study investigates how beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin process Mandarin tonal information. An ABX matching to sample task is adopted to investigate the discrimination of tonal pairs, the redistribution of attention between segmental and suprasegmental information, and the integrality of segmental and suprasegmental dimensions. Results show a clear developmental path in to...

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 ...

Auditory training has been shown to be effective in the identification of non-native segmental distinctions. In this study, it was investigated whether such training is applicable to the acquisition of non-native suprasegmental contrasts, i.c., Mandarin tones. Using the high-variability paradigm, eight American learners of Mandarin were trained in eight sessions during the course of two weeks t...

In this paper, we use prosodic information to improve the accuracy of our template-based automatic speech recognizer. Prosodic information is harvested adopting a data-driven approach. A number of prosodic features is extracted, then combined into major groups, and finally studied separately and together. All acoustic evidence, both segmental and suprasegmental, is modelled non-parametrically. ...