Short questions can be ambiguous even after considering their preceding contexts. Hence, prosody may be useful for disambiguating different types of questions and their uses. For example, question bias has been linked to the presence of certain pitch accents. This paper presents a corpus study of very short questions and the contribution of prosodic cues to discourse disambiguation. This study ...

The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the fine-grained phonetic details of German plosives which also cue the phonological fortis-lenis contrast. Closure durations were found to be longer at higher prosodic boundaries. There was also less glottal vibration in lenis plosives at higher prosodic boundaries. Voice onset time in lenis plosives was not affected by pros...

Prosodic phrasing plays a very important role in language comprehension and processing. It divides the speech into meaningful chunks of information. While most linguists accept that prosodic boundaries are marked by a variety of acoustic cues that involve pitch change, pauses, and pre-boundary lengthening (Cooper et al., 1978; Crystal & House, 1988; Klatt, 1975; Lehiste, 1973; Scott, 1982; Stre...

Speech intensity is one of the main prosodic cues, playing a role in most of the suprasegmental phenomena. Despite this, its contribution to the signalling of prosodic hierarchy is still relatively understudied, compared to the other cues, like duration or fundamental frequency. We present here an investigation on the role of intensity in prosodic boundary detection in four different languages,...

Sensitivity to prosodic cues might be used to constrain lexical search. Indeed, the prosodic organization of speech is such that words are invariably aligned with phrasal prosodic edges, providing a cue to segmentation. In this paper we devise an experimental paradigm that allows us to investigate the interaction between statistical and prosodic cues to extract words from a speech stream. We pr...

Previous work has shown that speakers and listeners efficiently exploit prosodic information to make the meaning of syntactically ambiguous sentences explicit. However, quantifiable phonetic properties of prosody in speech production (segmental duration, pause duration and fundamental frequency (f0)) stand in a complex relationship to the percept they invoke in the auditory domain. Not all meas...

In this paper we present work on the modelling of uncertainty by means of prosodic cues in an articulatory speech synthesizer. Our stimuli are embedded into short dialogues in question-answering situations in a human-machine scenario. The answers of the robot vary with respect to the intended level of (un)certainty, the independent variables are intonation (rising vs. falling) and filler (absen...