The present study mainly investigates the interaction of syntaxmarked focus and wh-question induced focus on the formation of F0 patterns in Standard Chinese (Hereinafter, SC). Acoustic experiment demonstrates that the syntax-marked (lian or shi) focus can co-exist with the wh-question induced focus. The results are two folds: (i) the two kinds of focuses can add together to trigger more obviou...

there are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. the former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. this study explores how relative importance is realized in english and persian. it also investigates how advanced persian learne...

The perception of prosodic prominence is known to be influenced by several distinct factors. In this study, we investigated the role of context, both global and local, in the prominence judgements of naı̈ve listeners. Monolingual English listeners marked where they heard prominence on pairs of twoword phrases (e.g. blue ball, green drum). Stimuli varied in whether or not the first phrase implied...

Control of prosody is essential for the synthesis of natural sounding speech. Text-to-speech systems tend to accent too many words when taking into account only the distinction between open-class and closed-class words. In the prominence-based approach [1], the degree of accentuation of a syllable is described in terms of a gradual prominence parameter. This paper presents the calculation of th...

Research in audiovisual prosody has shown that typically beat gestures are temporally integrated with prominent positions in speech (e.g., [1, 2]). There is independent evidence that both prosodic prominence (e.g., pitch accents) and gestural prominence associated with words (e.g., beat gestures) facilitate the recall of information (e.g., [3, 4, 5]). However, previous studies did not directly ...