We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9- to 11-year-old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns, whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of intonation contours: Previously encountered and novel ...

This study investigates how native English speakers acquire Mandarin lexical tones, and whether they can express declarative and question intonation in a tone language. Production errors suggest three stages of tone learning. The first stage is characterized by a high error rate resulting from prosody transfer. The second stage shows moderate success in the suppression of L1 prosody especially ...

This dissertation uses machine learning and visualization techniques to explore computational problems in tone and intonation. We quantify the lexical importance of tones in a language, recognize tones in a tonal language, and use intonational patterns to help recognize the meanings of parts of conversations. The recognition problems will be implemented in a modular manner so that features base...

In this paper, a correlation between the linguistic structure of the written text and the real intonation behavior of the read speech in European Portuguese language (EP) is presented. It is our belief that intonation behavior in EP can be strongly predicted from two main coordinates: the syntactic structure of the sentence and its pragmatic communicative function, in one way, combined with the...

In this study we investigate utterance-final intonation in two dialects of Kammu, one tonal and one non-tonal. While the general patterns of utterance-final intonation are similar between the dialects, we do find clear evidence that the lexical tones of the tonal dialect restrict the pitch range and the realization of focus. Speaker engagement can have a strong effect on the utterance-final acc...

This paper introduces Stem-ML, which is a model of the prosody generation process with an associated description language, and suggests how it may help prosody recognition. We applied Stem-ML modeling to three topics: the modeling of prosodic strengths, intonation types, and noun phrase patterns. Stem-ML parameters derived from )&* contours may have a more consistent relationship with prosodic ...

This study examines declarative sentence intonation contours in 8 vastly different Swiss German dialects by the application of the Command-Response model. Fundamental frequency patterns of a controlled declarative sentence are analyzed on the global and local level of intonation. The results provide evidence of a different patterning for the dialects in the context of how global and local level...

While current tools for the automatic analysis and modeling of intonation are satisfactory for laboratory or isolated sentences, they appear insufficient for the study of longer stretches of authentic speech, which are in general marked by systematic changes of register. This study shows that implementing automatically detected register changes significantly improves the accuracy of the automat...

This study uses musical notation to describe speech prosody in connected speech in Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish, using English as a comparison where needed. Through this research we establish the basis on which to expand our future work on speech prosody, from methodology to data collection and analyses, and then make initial observations regarding potentially significant prosodic p...