This paper reports on an analysis of prosodic cues for emotion characterization in 100 natural spoken dialogs recorded at a telephone customer service center. The corpus annotated with task-dependent emotion tags which were validated by a perceptual test. Two F0 range parameters, one at the sentence level and the other at the subsegment level, emerge as the most salient cues for emotion classif...

An experiment was conducted in order to determine whether left- (LHD) and right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients exhibit sensitivity to prosodic information that is used in syntactic disambiguation. Following the work of, a cross-modal lexical decision task was performed by LHD and RHD subjects, as well as by adults without brain pathology (NC). Subjects listened to sentences with attachment a...

Brain processes underlying spoken language comprehension comprise auditory encoding, prosodic analysis and linguistic evaluation. Auditory encoding usually activates both hemispheres while language-specific stages are lateralized: analysis of prosodic cues are right-lateralized while linguistic evaluation is left-lateralized. Here, we investigated to what extent the absence of prosodic informat...

In this study we examined prosodic characteristics of a word used in several distinct senses in a task-oriented corpus of spontaneous speech. We compared the pitch characteristics of the word “right” used in three different senses: as an acknowledgment, as a direction, and as an affirmative answer to a question. Significant differences in intonation for different classes of usage were found, al...

Previous studies have revealed that infants aged 6-10 months are able to use the acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, that is, pitch change, preboundary lengthening, and pause, for the segmentation of the continuous speech signal. Moreover, investigations with American-English- and Dutch-learning infants suggest that processing prosodic boundary markings involves a weighting of the...

The current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found. Prosodic information provides cues to grammatical ...

In this study, we employed an eye-gaze paradigm to explore whether children (8-12) and adolescents (12-18) with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are able to use prosodic cues to disambiguate syntactic structure of an utterance. Persons with ASD were compared to typicallydeveloping peers matched on chronological age, IQ, gender, and receptive language abilities. We found that the ASD and TD group...

Previous work examining prosodic cues in online spoken word recognition has focused primarily on local cues to word identity. However, recent studies have suggested that sentence-level prosodic patterns can also influence the downstream interpretation of lexically ambiguous syllables (Dilley & McAuley, 2008; Dilley, Mattys, & Vinke, 2010). To test the hypothesis that these distal prosody effect...

Previous work examining prosodic cues in online spoken-word recognition has focused primarily on local cues to word identity. However, recent studies have suggested that utterance-level prosodic patterns can also influence the interpretation of subsequent sequences of lexically ambiguous syllables (Dilley & McAuley, 2008; Dilley, Mattys, & Vinke, 2010). To test the hypothesis that these distal ...

In this paper, a recurrent neural network (RNN) based prosodic modeling method for Mandarin speech-to-text conversion is proposed. The prosodic modeling is performed in the post-processing stage of acoustic decoding and aims at detecting word-boundary cues to assist in linguistic decoding. It employs a simple three-layer RNN to learn the relationship between input prosodic features, extracted f...