In order to gain knowledge about the interaction between topdown expectations of listeners concerning prosodic prominence and its acoustic correlates, two exploratory empirical studies were carried out. First, native and nonnative subjects rated prominences of speech read at normal and very fast —prosodically very different — speech. Later, these ratings were compared with introspective promine...

The local speech rate is one of the important prosodic parameters for representing both linguistic and paralinguistic information. The present paper presents a command-response model for the process of speech rate control, and applies it to the analysis of the effects of emphasis on the local speech rate in English utterances. It shows that the local speech rate as a function of time can be app...

Introduction Speech prosody refers to melodic or suprasegmental features of an utterance (e.g., pitch) that may signal a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic functions (Lehiste, 1996). Over the last quarter century, increasing attention has been focused on the roles of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in the processing of prosodic information. Evidence has been steadily acc...

Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary at three levels of prosodic structur...

Prosodic structure encodes the grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech in American English through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their in...

Voice quality conveys both linguistic and paralinguistic information, and can be distinguished by acoustic source characteristics. We label objective voice quality categories based on the harmonic structure (H1-H2) and the mean autocorrelation ratio of each phone. Results from a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification experiment show that these features are predictive of Perceptual Linear P...

Imitation in the form of repeating speech sounds, accents, and words plays a foundational role in the normal acquisition and development of language (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Adank et al., 2013) eventually contributing to a life-long fine-tuning of communication skills (Tannen, 1987; Delvaux and Soquet, 2007). Imitation of prosodic and paralinguistic features may be intentional in certain context...

1. Introduction In human communication, speech conveys not only linguistic information but also emphasis, intention, attitude and so on. They are called paralinguistic information [1]. There are several researches on paralinguistic information [2,3]. Methods for modeling or detecting of paralinguistic information is useful for various application in man-machine communication such as speech synt...

Expressive interjection (EI) is defined as non-lexical speech sound which indicates the speaker’s cognitive/affective state changes. It is a type of vocal affect burst, i.e., brief and sudden nonverbal expressions that are produced spontaneously and unconsciously. Although EI as a social signal is assumed to play an important part in speech communication, very little is known about its linguist...

The MediaTeam Emotional Speech Corpus is currently the largest database of emotional speech for colloquial modern Finnish, containing simulated emotional content. The specific aim of the research is to investigate in detail the phonetic and phonological/linguistic correlates of basic or primary emotions in spoken Finnish, to develop statistical classification methods of emotional speech signals...