We presents prosodic cues, i.e. duration, average F0 (M-F0), F0 slope (D-F0) and spectral center of gravity (CoG), to the functions acknowledgment, continuer, disagreement, surprise, enthusiasm and uncertainty as expressed via short vocal feedback by a professional voiceover artist. The post-hoc tests showed that most functions were expressed with a rather contrastive prosody and in a consisten...

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Forschungsvorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministers f ur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie unter dem F orderkennzeichen 01 IV 102 H/0 und 01 IV 102 F/4 gef ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei den Autoren. ABSTRACT Automatic dialog systems tested with naive users are often confronted with special speaking style...

This paper reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch NPs. Accent-patterns were obtained in a (semi-)spontaneous way via a simple dialogue-game with 8 Dutch speakers and 4 Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, a...

In this paper, we propose an online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, positive negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations then projected into feature space. Therein, learning respectively conducted in row column space by maximizing simil...

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

This study considers the pronunciation of Japanese learners of English. Its first intent is to offer a brief overview of Japanese phonological and prosodic features to highlight anticipated L1 transfer issues in spoken English output. It then explores the segmental and suprasegmental aspects of a short recorded performance by two intermediate Japanese learners of English against a sample of Rec...

This article presents new evidence from English that the theory of grammar makes a distinction between the contrastive focus and discourse-new status of constituents. The evidence comes from a phonetic investigation which compares the prosody of all-new sentences with the prosody of sentences combining contrastive focus and discourse-new constituents. We have found that while the sentences of t...

A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers’ and students’ cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English and other languages and viewed students as cult...

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of breathy-to-creaky phonation contours in vowels from a production study of native speakers of English and White Hmong. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal...

The present paper argues that multilingual generation must be considered as a kind of multilingual communication requiring similar resources as translation. One of the central resources necessary is that of contrastive knowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. We will show what this contrastive knowledge comprises and make a proposal of how to construct it employing the approach used in the...