This study investigates the relations between the degree of prominence and articulatory-prosodic cues in emotional speech. In particular, this study considers articulatory parameters driven from the Converter/Distributor (C/D) model. The goal is to obtain a better understanding of the link among syllable magnitude in the C/D model, the empirical way to measure it in literature, and syllable-lev...

While the realization of focus in languages which express focus either syntactically or prosodically or through a combination of both prosody and syntax has been studied relatively extensively, e.g. English (Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986), Korean (Cho 1990, Jun 1993), Chichewa (Kanerva 1990), Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991, Lahiri and Fitzpatrick-Cole 1999), Shanghai Chinese (Selkirk and Shen ...

PURPOSE Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-year-olds despite differences in acou...

It is well known that listeners of probably all languages give verbal and non-verbal signals, called backchannels, to their interlocutors. However, it is not well understood what drives listeners to backchannel. To what degree are they an indicator of listener attention? Are backchannels semantically motivated, performed when the message has been parsed and comprehended? Or are they automatic r...

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hiddenMarkov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We e...