Theoretical framework: ŸSociolinguistics (Labov, Chafe, Biber, etc.) ŸConversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Wooffitt, etc.) ŸIntonational Analysis (Pierrehumbert, Beckman, etc.) Diverse units in spontaneous speech: Ÿspeech act Ÿidea unit Ÿinformation unit Ÿintonation unit, intonational phrase, tone group Ÿprosodic unit, prosodic phrase, prosodic group, prosodic utterance Ÿbreath g...

Prosodic cues are of great importance in parsing speech signal into prosodic and lexical units. Listeners detect the changes of the prosodic parameters and interpret them to detect sentence modalities or the mood of the speaker. Some automatic speech recognition systems try to use prosodic parameters to detect boundaries of prosodic units and help thus the acoustic decoding process. Although th...

Speech corpus of Chinese discourse (ASCCD) was setup and annotated on segmental and prosodic and syntactic tiers. SAMPA-C and C-ToBI conventions are used for segmental and prosodic labeling. Sound variation such as assimilation, insertion and deletion are investigated on the labeled database. The prosodic research focuses on the sentence stress that involves the specification of relative promin...

Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--temporal grouping--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase boundaries are characterized by temporal grouping of functi...

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a prosodic projection into the RRG inventory of grammatical representation. This is a development of previous research in O’Connor (2006). In particular the prosodic projection enables investigation of prosodic aspects of information structure (focus structure) within the RRG framework to proceed alongside existing investigation of syntactic and other...

This paper presents a work-in-progress on the automatic analysis of discourse genre in non-elicited speech. The study is focused on the development of bottom-up methods for automatic validation of discourse typologies found in linguistic descriptions (prosodic, syntactic, pragmatic and/or contextual and situational cues). The linguistic classification examined here opposes five discourse genres...

This paper argues that prosodic annotation and modeling should be combined for facilitating analyses of prosodic functions that invariably require perceptual judgments. It compares perceptual prosodic annotations of prominent syllables and phrase boundaries with labels yielded by the combination of linguistic information from a TTS-front end, model-based prosodic features, as well as a model of...