Durational contrasts can be used to signal prosodic boundaries (utterance-final lengthening) and discourse focus (accentual lengthening). Durational differences can also signal phonemic vowel length contrast such as in non-rhotic Australian English where vowel length distinguishes lexical items (such as, cart /k :t/ and cut /k t/). This raises the question of how and when children acquire phone...

The goal of this paper is to focus on non-verbal speech information during meeting and see if this information contains cues enabling the discrimination of meeting phases—divergent and convergent phases using decision trees. Group task experiments were conducted using a modified 20Q. The recorded speech was analyzed to identify various utterance pattern features—utterance frequency, length of u...

A dedicated resource, consisting of annotated speech data, tools, and workflow design, was developed for the detailed investigation of discourse phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin. The discourse phenomena have functions which are associated with positions in utterances, and temporal properties, and include discourse markers (‘NAGE’, ’NA’, e.g. ‘hesitation’, ‘utterance initiation’), discourse particle...

The phonological vowel and consonant length distinctions in languages such as Hungarian may provide a constraint on the degree to which prosodic structure can influence speech segment duration. Here we show that, like many other languages, Hungarian does mark prosodic structure with durational variation, in particular, utterance-final lengthening. There is an influence of phonological vowel len...

In this paper, we propose a speaking rate compensation method using frame period and frame length adaptation. Our method decodes an input utterance using several sets of frame period and frame length parameters for speech analysis. Then, this method selects the best set with the highest score which consists of the acoustic likelihood normalized by frame period, language likelihood and insertion...