Child engagement is defined as the interaction of a child with his/her environment in a contextually appropriate manner. Engagement behavior in children is linked to socio-emotional and cognitive state assessment with enhanced engagement identified with improved skills. A vast majority of studies however rely solely, and often implicitly, on subjective perceptual measures of engagement. Access ...

Recent studies of the acoustic correlates of various prosodic elements in American English, such as prominence (in the form of phrase-level pitch accents and word-level lexical stress) and boundaries (in the form of boundary-marking tones), have begun to clarify the nature of the acoustic cues to different types and levels of these prosodic markers. This study focuses on the importance of contr...

The aim of the work to be reported here is to explore the utility of prosodic information in language identification and discrimination tasks. The purpose of this study is to see whether prosodic patterns can be considered as reliable acoustic cues for the discrimination of Arabic dialects by investigating, via a perceptual experiment, if listeners are successful in identifying the Arabic diale...

Theories of discourse structure hypothesize a hierarchical structure of discourse segments, typically tree-structured. While substantial work has been done on identifying and automatically recognizing the textual and prosodic correlates of discourse structure in monologue, comparable cues for dialogue or multiparty conversation, and in particular humancomputer dialogue remain relatively less st...

We identify methods of distinguishing between correctly and incorrectly recognized utterances (scored by hand for semantic concept accuracy) for a speech recognition system, using acoustic/prosodic characteristics. The analysis was performed on data collected during independent experiments done with an interactive voice response system that provides travel information over the phone.

In this paper, we investigate the acoustic prosodic marking of demonstrative and personal pronouns in taskoriented dialog. Although it has been hypothesized that acoustic marking affects pronoun resolution, we find that the prosodic information extracted from the data is not sufficient to predict antecedent type reliably. Interspeaker variation accounts for much of the prosodic variation that w...

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the nor...

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the nor...

1. Introduction A common topic in recent literature on phonology is the question of whether phonological processes and segments are licensed by prosodic position or by perceptual cues. The former is the traditional view, as represented by e.g. Lombardi (1995) and Beckman (1998), and holds that segments occur in specific prosodic positions such as the coda. In a licensing by cue approach, as rep...

Listeners have been shown to distinguish text read aloud from spontaneous speech, with a range of prosodic features suggested as cues to speech style. However, significant variation is seen across studies, both in speech elicitation methods and in the nature of listeners’ orientation to prosodic cues. We asked whether listeners could distinguish spontaneous ‘map task’ speech from lexically iden...