In this paper we investigate the contribution of consonant duration to the signaling of accentual prominence in Mawng, a language spoken in Northern Australia. We compare consonants in VC sequences where the vowel is part of an accented or tonic syllable vs. non-tonic (non-prominent) VC sequences. We further analyse the contribution of vowel-consonant timing to prominence, through an analysis o...

Perceived prominence in Russian, a free word order language, can be communicated prosodically and/or via word order. Paired production and perception experiments with native speakers show that discourse-prominent constituents are marked acoustically and through a change in word order. These two route to prominence may reinforce each other, as evident from distinctively higher duration and inten...

This paper presents an acoustical analysis of vowels in a Northern Australian language, Gupapuyngu, in order to investigate whether vowels in CVCV words differ according to prosodic prominence and word position. It is shown that back vowels are produced with a narrower constriction when prosodically prominent and word-initial. However, in general, vowels tend not to be hyperarticulated under co...

this article attempts to see, through the structural significances of poetic language, the nature of the split between linguistic description and literary interpretation. rhythm is the most prominent means of relating form to content in poetic language. the first account of this prominence is seen through identifying its position in the two prosodic forms of metrical and non-metrical poetry. fo...

Previous studies showed for German and other (West) Germanic language, including English, that perceived syllable prominence is primarily controlled by changes in duration and F0, with the latter cue being more powerful than the former. Our study is an initial approach to develop this prominence hierarchy further by putting numbers on the interplay of duration and F0. German listeners indirectl...

Prosody is often attributed a fundamental role in the process of language acquisition, allowing infants to use prosodic cues to begin to acquire the syntactic structures of their language. The Prosodic Bootstrapping process may combine a number of phonological phenomena (e.g., stress, rhythmic units, intonation), and recently, it has been proposed that a Rhythmic Activation Principle integratin...

The problem of second language acquisition and its true nature is a controversial issue in second language teaching. Different camps propose different methods to approach the very nature of second language acquisition. Among these, Stephen Krashen and his advocates raised the issue of implicit second language teaching and the prominence of input that are expounded in the present article. In so ...

The prosodic realization of focus can vary depending on various factors such as type of focus (e.g., information focus, corrective focus), morphosyntax (whether or not a language has a morpho-syntactic marker of focus), and intonational phonology of language, and thus is language-specific. On one hand, head-prominence languages such as English, German, and Greek, mark prominence through the use...

Besides phrasing, prominence is one of the most important parameters of speech prosody to model. The so called data driven approaches nowadays seem to be the appropriate solution for prosody modeling in current text to speech (TTS) systems. They allow prosodic regularities to be automatically extracted from a prosodic database of natural speech. In this paper we’ll present an evaluation of suit...