This paper investigates the influence of duration and F0 interval of the utterance-final F0 contour on the perception of sentence modality, i.e. declarative or interrogative sentence. An utterance-final rising contour with a constant F0 interval of 2 semitones or more and a voicing duration of at least 50 ms leads to unanimously identified interrogative modality. Even at durations of 20 and 30 ...

PURPOSE Near visual acuity is an essential measurement during an oculo-visual assessment. Short duration continuous text reading charts measure reading acuity and other aspects of reading performance. There is no standardized version of such chart in Arabic. The aim of this study is to create sentences of equal readability to use in the development of a standardized Arabic continuous text readi...

The aim of this paper is to examine effects on syllable prominence exerted by word and phrase boundaries, lexical stress, and sentence focus, and by the interactions between these factors. In a production study, German verb prefixes potentially forming prosodic minimal word pairs were systematically placed in a set of different contexts. Acoustic analyses showed a consistent effect of lexical s...

This paper examines the semantics of sentence-final stress in Mandarin Chinese and gives a uniform account of the distribution and interpretation of emphatic stress. A phonetic production study shows that the use of sentence-final stress by Mandarin speakers is sensitive to the evidentiality of the context. A semantic rating study shows that listeners judge sentences with evidenced contexts as ...

This paper examined the characteristics of the English rising tone in yes-no questions produced by native speakers of Japanese according to the different levels of the intelligibility of intonation. Five native English speakers evaluated the intelligibility for three kinds of yes-no questions read by 10 Japanese speakers: the questions were those with the nucleus placed in the sentenceinitial, ...

In an ERP study, following stimuli with a world knowledge violation we added a sentence-level context which made a world knowledge violation more acceptable in order to investigate how participants processed the subsequent sentence context. Sentences consisting of five Chinese words were of three experimental types: correct sentences with correct world knowledge and coherent sentence meaning, i...

This study investigated the effects of combined semantic and syntactic violations in relation to the effects of single semantic and single syntactic violations on language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effects (N400 and P600/SPS). Syntactic violations consisted of a mismatch in grammatical gender or number features of the definite article and the noun in sentence-internal or sente...

In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for performing token and sentence levels Dialect Identification in Arabic. Specifically we try to identify whether each token in a given sentence belongs to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Egyptian Dialectal Arabic (EDA) or some other class and whether the whole sentence is mostly EDA or MSA. The token level component relies on a Conditional Random Fiel...