The three experiments reported here compare the effectiveness of natural prosodic and vocal-tract size cues at overcoming spatial cues in selective attention. Listeners heard two simultaneous sentences and decided which of two simultaneous target words came from the attended sentence. Experiment 1 used sentences that had natural differences in pitch and in level caused by a change in the locati...

When listening to speech from one's native language, words seem to be well separated from one another, like beads on a string. When listening to a foreign language, in contrast, words seem almost impossible to extract, as if there was only one bead on the same string. This contrast reveals that there are language-specific cues to segmentation. The puzzle, however, is that infants must be endowe...

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from the timing and...

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for informationextraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (informationgleaned from the timing and m...

We present a corpus-based approach for using intonation and duration to detect disfluency sites. The questions we aim to answer are: What are the prosodic cues for each disfluency type? Can predictive models be built to describe the relationship between disfluency types and prosodic cues? Are there correlations between the reparandum onset and offset and the repair onset and offset? Is there a ...

Speech prosody plays an important role in communication of meaning. The cognitive and computational mechanisms supporting this remain to be understood, however. Prosodic cues vary across talkers speaking conditions, creating ambiguity the sound-to-meaning mapping. We hypothesize that listeners ameliorate part by learning talker-specific statistics prosodic cues. To test hypothesis, we investiga...

This artificial language learning (ALL) study investigates how multiple sublexical cues contribute simultaneously to lexical segmentation in French. Previous research [9] has explored segmentation in lexical identification by presenting conflicting sublexical cues in the same experiment. We argue that this method of pitting conflicting cues against each other pairwise does not allow the researc...