This article examines the communication of text-based synchronous online discussion (chat) participants during the process of information sharing. It addresses the communicational constraints imposed by the computer-mediated communication (CMC) channel on participants’ expression of interpersonal and affective stances, analyzes the mechanisms participants employed to overcome these constraints,...

This paper discusses rhythmic characteristics of Standard Chinese. The study is based on relevant acoustic-phonetic investigations, including some paralinguistic analyses. The preliminary result leads to the considerations that (1) there is no evidence to regard Chinese as a syllable-timed language; (2) speech rhythm may be more related to regular occurrence and variation of certain prosodic ph...

This paper explores the relationship between perceived syllable prominence and the acoustic properties of a speech utterance. It is aimed at establishing a link between the linguistic meaning of an utterance in terms of sentence modality and focus with its underlying prosodic features. Our acoustic analysis compares traditional parameters modified by focus and sentence mode like fundamental fre...

In addition to linguistically coded information, speech conveys necessarily also some paralinguistic information of expressive (affective and adaptive), organic and perspectival kind, but all respective features lack invariant absolute acoustic correlates. According to the Modulation Theory, a speaker’s voice functions as a carrier that is modulated by speech gestures. Listeners have to demodul...

It is widely accepted that linguistic high level information like information structure (focus-background-division, topicalization) influences accent placement and accent type (rising, falling, hat pattern etc.) in German. Previous research was concentrated on tonal patterns associated with focus and topic ([1],[2]). We will demonstrate that 1) sentence initial tonal variation and 2) syllable d...

We present here a trainable generative model of French prosody. We focus on the sentence level and design SNNs able to generate both rhythmic and intonation contours for diverse attitudes. First results of a perceptual test show that listeners are able to retrieve the right definition of attitudes by listening to synthetic PSOLA stimuli. 1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK In our theoretical framework pro...

Despite its very high relevance for human communication current spoken dialog systems usually ignore the prosodic variations in the speech signal [1, 2, 3]. In [4] it was shown that speakers use prosodic cues to highlight corrections in a dialog with a machine and that these can be detected using prosodic cues. We extended this idea in [5] to the audio-visual discrimination of prominent from no...

This paper presents an automatic system to detect sentence boundaries in speech recognition transcripts. Two systems were developed that use independent sources of information. One is a linguistic system that uses linguistic features in a statistical language model while the other is an acoustic system that uses prosodic features in a feed-forward neural network model. A third system was develo...

Phonetic variation, and especially prosodic variation, which is often paralinguistic in nature has gradually attracted more attention among speech researchers and speech scientists as one of the possible solutions to problems with automatic speaker recognition (ASrR) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) systems. This paper presents a brief overview of approaches to phonetic variation in ASrR and ...

Two primary sources of information are provided in human speech. On the one hand, the verbal channel encodes linguistic content, while on the other hand, the vocal channel transmits paralinguistic information, mainly through prosody. In line with several studies that induce a conflict between these two channels to better understand the role of prosody, we conducted an experiment in which subjec...