This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do, (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure, and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The inf...

This investigation examined whether speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across semantic domains and whether listeners use these cues to derive word meaning from novel words. Speakers were asked to produce phrases in infant-directed speech in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small). Acoustic analyses revealed th...

Previous analyses on friendly speech were made using dialogues without differentiating their linguistic functions. This paper reports an analysis on declarative and interrogative sentences respectively. Pitch and duration of prosodic words were statistically analyzed and compared concerning factors of their positions and stresses. Based on the acoustic investigation of friendly speech, tonal pi...

This paper investigated the potential acoustic correlates of word stress within a disyllabic tonal sequence, a rising tone followed by a rising tone (Tone2 Tone2) in Mandarin, based on a large corpus with adequate information of stress patterns and prosodic boundary levels. The results showed that a) For Tone2+Tone2 words, features based on tone nucleus were more effective than that of the whol...

Speech accommodation happens when two people engage in verbal conversation. In this paper two types of accommodation are investigated – one dependent on cognitive, physiological, functional and social constraints (Convergence), the other dependent on linguistic and paralinguistic factors (Synchrony). Convergence refers to the situation when two speakers’ speech characteristics move towards a co...

The relationship between prosodic structure and syntactic structure is an unresolved area of inquiry, partly due to the shortage of prosodically transcribed speech corpora, and partly due to the complexity involved in the analysis of both syntax and prosody. Chomsky & Halle (1968, p. 372) state that “although there is a substantial literature on intonational and prosodic features in English, it...

In this paper, a new model-based Mandarin-speech coding system is proposed. It employs a prosody-enriched ASR with a hierarchical prosodic model (HPM) to generate from the input speech enriched transcriptions, including linguistic features, prosodic tags and spectral parameters in the encoder. By sending these features to the decoder, we can first reconstruct the prosodic-acoustic features of s...

Prosodic correlates of 6 referent status taxonomies and 3 distance-from-last-mention heuristics both on the acoustic and on the symbolic level (ToBI) were investigated in a corpus of short news reports read by 6 professional newsreaders. Symbolic correlates are found mainly for pronouns, acoustic correlates for nouns and proper names. However, both form and extent of these correlates varies con...

Phonemic models of spoken language are incapable of accommodating the patterns of pronunciation variation observed in spontaneous speech (as exemplified by a corpus of American English telephone dialogues, a.k.a. SWITCHBOARD). Variation in pronunciation with respect to segmental identity and duration can be accounted for in terms of a juncture-accent model, in which position of the segment with...

This paper examines the causes of frustration, and how speakers display their frustration in conversational arguments in terms of interactional organization, linguistic features, paralinguistic features, and embodied actions based on the method of discourse analysis. The expression of emotion is co-constructed by verbal cues, non-verbal vocal cues, and bodily behavior. The data presented here r...