The acoustic-phonetic properties of words spoken with three different levels of accentuation (de-accented, pre-nuclear and nuclear accented in broad-focus and nuclear accented in narrow-focus) are examined in question-answer elicited sentences and iterative imitations (on the syllable da) produced by six French and six German speakers. Normalised parameter values allow a comparative weighting o...

In a production experiment on Bulgarian that was based on a previous study on Dutch [1], we investigated the role of prosody when linguistic and extra-linguistic information coincide or contradict. Speakers described abnormally colored fruits in conditions where contrastive focus and discourse relations were varied. We found that the coincidence of contrast and abnormality enhances accentuation...

In this work, perceptual organization has been studied with the same spirit and phenomenological methods used by Gestalt psychologists. This was accomplished through new conditions that cannot be explained in terms of the classical principles of grouping. Perceptual grouping represents the way through which our visual system builds integrated elements on the basis of the maximal homogeneity amo...

Correct accentuation and phrasing improves the quality of synthetic speech. This paper discusses an algorithm which assigns both sentence accents and phrase boundaries on the basis of the prosodic sentence structure. Although this latter structure is theoretically derived from the syntactic structure, the present algorithm deterrnines the prosodic structure by means of (linguistically and stati...

This study focuses on the implementation of the phonetic effects of vowel accentuation in automatic speech recognition (ASR). The durational and spectral effects of accentuation are investigated separately by manipulating the transition and observation probabilities in hidden Markov models. We also attempt to implement the undershoot hypothesis [1], which describes spectral reduction as a direc...

This article is devoted to the early detection of psychopathological changes, study temperament and character accentuation, as well identification anxiety-phobic disorders which are observed in taekwondo athletes through psycho diagnostic examinations.