It is difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of prosodic features in automatic word recognition. Recently, we applied the suprasegmental concept and proposed an extra layer of acoustic modeling with syllables. Nevertheless, there is a mismatch between the syllable and the word units and that makes subsequent steps after acoustic modeling difficult. In this study, we explore English word seg...

This paper presents our approach to automatically detect tone nuclei, and to use their features for recognizing lexical tones of Chinese continuous speech. We have suggested that Fundamental frequency (F0) contour of a syllable usually consists of three segments: onset course, tone nucleus and offset course. Among them, only tone nucleus contains key features for tone discrimination, hence the ...

The Chinese writing system provides an excellent case for testing the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information in reading words aloud within the same language. In logographic Chinese characters, neither segmental nor tonal information is explicitly represented, whereas in Pinyin, an alphabetic transcription of the character, both are explicitly represented. Two primed naming exp...

Two visual world experiments tested the hypothesis that expectations based on preceding prosody influence the perception of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. Experiment 1 showed that phonemically overlapping words with different initial stress patterns compete for recognition. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that fundamental frequency and syllable timing patterns across material precedin...

This study investigates how beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin process Mandarin tonal information. An ABX matching to sample task is adopted to investigate the discrimination of tonal pairs, the redistribution of attention between segmental and suprasegmental information, and the integrality of segmental and suprasegmental dimensions. Results show a clear developmental path in to...

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also...

Four cross-modal priming experiments and two forced-choice identification experiments investigated the use of suprasegmental cues to stress in the recognition of spoken English words, by native (English-speaking) and non-native (Dutch) listeners. Previous results had indicated that suprasegmental information was exploited in lexical access by Dutch but not by English listeners For both listener...

It is well established that in human speech perception the left hemisphere (LH) of the brain is specialized for processing intelligible phonemic (segmental) content (e.g., [1-3]), whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive to prosodic (suprasegmental) cues. Despite evidence that a range of mammal species show LH specialization when processing conspecific vocalizations, the presence of ...