In our study we use the experimental framework of priming to manipulate our subjects‘ expectations of syllable prominence in sentences with a well-defined syntactic and phonological structure. It shows that it is possible to prime prominence patterns and that priming leads to significant differences in the judgment of syllable prominence.

The goal of this paper is to investigate French word segmentation strategies using phonemic and lexical transcriptions as well as prosodic and part-of-speech annotations. Average fundamental frequency (f0) profiles and phoneme duration profiles are measured using 13 hours of broadcast news speech to study prosodic regularities of French words. Some influential factors are taken into considerati...

The songs of oscine passerine birds vary on many spatial scales, reflecting the actions of diverse evolutionary pressures. Here we examine the songs of Cisticola erythrops, which effectively signal species identity across a geographical area spanning 6500 km in sub-Saharan Africa. Selection for species identification should promote stability in song traits, while sexual selection and geographic...

The durational patterns between short and long vowels were investigated at the segmental and lexical level using four different word structures in Japanese, Finnish and Czech. The results confirmed that the Japanese segmental ratios between short and long vowels were longer than in Finnish and Czech; the Czech durational ratios in the second syllable were longer than those in the first syllable...

Acquisition of orthography is an important problem in German elementary schools. Today, few, if any, schoolbooks can claim to use knowledge of the deep syllable structure of German and its patterns for explicit orthography instruction. To fill this gap, a game described here allows children to explore the complete complexity of the German syllable patterns in analogy to phonics instruction used...

Adult mice are highly vocal animals, with both males and females vocalizing in same sex and cross sex social encounters. Mouse pups are also highly vocal, producing isolation vocalizations when they are cold or removed from the nest. This study examined patterns in the development of pup isolation vocalizations, and compared these to adult vocalizations. In three litters of CBA/CaJ mice, we rec...

Acoustic analysis and synthesis experiments have shown that duration and intonation patterns are the two most important prosodic features responsible for the quality of synthesized speech. In this paper a set of features are proposed which will influence the duration patterns of the sequence of the sound units. These features are derived from the results of the duration analysis. Duration analy...

The effects of age and hearing loss on recognition of unaccented and accented words of varying syllable length were investigated. It was hypothesized that with increments in length of syllables, there would be atypical alterations in syllable stress in accented compared to native English, and that these altered stress patterns would be sensitive to auditory temporal processing deficits with agi...

This paper examines the two sandhi patterns of disyllabic compound whose initial tone is either a high falling tone (T3) or a dipping tone (T5) in Suzhou in the framework of Optimality Theory. The idea of different levels of tone melody in (Shih, 1986) is adopted in this paper. Namely, the syllable level tone melody changes to word level which lead to the neutralization of T3 and T5 sandhi. Lef...

This paper develops computational tools for evaluating competing syllabic parses of a phonological string on the basis of temporal patterns in speech production data. This is done by constructing models linking syllable parses to patterns of coordination between articulatory events. Data simulated from different syllabic parses are evaluated against experimental data from American English and M...