Previous studies have demonstrated that motor control of segmental features of speech rely to some extent on sensory feedback. Control of voice fundamental frequency (F0) has been shown to be modulated by perturbations in voice pitch feedback during various phonatory tasks and in Mandarin speech. The present study was designed to determine if voice Fo is modulated in a task-dependent manner dur...

This paper formalizes and tests two key assumptions of the concept of suprasegmental timing: segmental independence and suprasegmental mediation. Segmental independence holds that the duration of a suprasegmental unit such as a syllable or foot is only minimally dependent on its segments. Suprasegmental mediation states that the duration of a segment is determined by the duration of its suprase...

We show how prosody can be used in speech understanding systems. This is demonstrated with the VERBMOBIL speech–to–speech translation system, the world wide first complete system, which successfully uses prosodic information in the linguistic analysis. Prosody is used by computing probabilities for clause boundaries, accentuation, and different types of sentence mood for each of the word hypoth...

The Prosodic Module of SLIM has been created in order to solve problems related to segmental and suprasegmental features of spoken English in a courseware for computerassisted foreign language learning called SLIM an acronym for Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software, developed at the University of Venice. It is composed of two different sets of Learning Activities, the first one dealing wi...

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological models. The first phase is an exploration of th...

Suprasegmental information, while generally thought to play an important role in speech recognition by human listeners, has shown little promise in previous attempts to integrate into ASR systems. This paper outlines an approach that will successfully exploit suprasegmental information by modeling duration within the context of N-gram language modeling. Results show that up to half of the varia...

Building on previous works (e.g. Kubozono 2006, and Kang 2010), this article attempts to establish a taxonomy for loanword prosody, referring specifically to the patterns of stress, tone, or pitch-accent that are found in loanwords. Toward a taxonomy, we consider the following factors: (i) whether the pronunciation of the word in the source language influences the assignment of prosody in the b...

We develop a model for identifying languages and accents in audio recordings. Our Hierarchical-Sequential Nodule Model (HSNM) incorporates both short-distance features (which capture simple linguistic distinctions, e.g. phoneme inventories) and longdistance features (which detect long-distance suprasegmental patterns, e.g. tone and prosody) which help a classifier discriminate intelligently amo...