In the intonation of polar questions in the Northern Russian dialect of Varzuga (Kola Peninsula), two different intonation patterns are frequently used: the Standard Russian H*L pitch accent, with a high rise and immediate fall, but also a “broad hat” pattern, in which the high rise is followed by a late fall, aligned to the first syllable after the last lexical stress. This contour does not fi...

We tested German nine-month-olds' reliance on pitch and metrical stress for segmentation. In a headturn-preference paradigm, infants were familiarized with trisyllabic words (weak-strong-weak (WSW) stress pattern) in sentence-contexts. The words were presented in one of three naturally occurring intonation conditions: one in which high pitch was aligned with the stressed syllable and two misali...

Text-to-Prosody systems based on the use of prosodic databases extracted from natural speech will be a key point for further development of new Text-to-Speech systems. This paper describes a system using such speech databases to generate the rhythm and the intonation of texts written in French. The system is based on a very crude chinks ’n chunks prosodic phrasing algorithm and on an automatic ...

It is generally assumed that a question intonationally is accompanied with a certain question tune, usually characterized by a final rise in pitch (e.g. Bolinger 1978). If we consider German question intonation, the tonal characteristics of yes-no-questions seem to match the general pattern of a final rise in pitch. According to the intonational accounts of Standard German yes-no-questions endi...

OBJECTIVES Intonation may serve as a cue for facilitated recognition and processing of spoken words and it has been suggested that the pitch contour of spoken words is implicitly remembered. Thus, using the repetition suppression (RS) effect of BOLD-fMRI signals, we tested whether the same spoken words are differentially processed in language and auditory brain areas depending on whether or not...

The effectiveness on the television communication is sustained on the handling of voice, which is the base of fundamental expression of the audio-visual contents. Consequently, the audience attention to the television message as well as understanding and assimilating of it, will depend on a correct and expressive use of voice. These reasons guarantee the necessity to make an empirical investiga...

Previous studies on Cantonese Chinese showed that rising question intonation contours on low-toned words lead to frequent misperceptions of the tones. Here we explored the processing consequences of this interaction between tone and intonation by comparing the processing and identification of monosyllabic critical words at the end of questions and statements, using a tone identification task, a...