Intonation languages signal pragmatic functions (e.g. information structure) by means of different pitch accent types. Acoustically, pitch accent types differ in the alignment of pitch peaks (and valleys) in regard to stressed syllables, which makes the position of pitch peaks an unreliable cue to lexical stress (even though pitch peaks and lexical stress often coincide in intonation languages)...

Database designs, if based on the premise that there are about 2000 diphones in English, as stated in many publications and on-line documents, are likely to render a database of diphones, which will fail to capture some important phonological phenomena of English. This paper proposes a TTS database, which is built from diphones inclusive of their syllabic stress; we term these units lexical dip...

the present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on efl learners’ reading comprehension. eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  zand institute of higher education in shiraz, iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced toefl test constructed by education...

This study investigated how children deploy cues to prominence in a speech task designed to encourage lexical stress shift. The duration, amplitude and F0 of the rhymes in stress-shiftable words were compared in stress clash and non-clash contexts. In adults’ speech, lexical and phrasal prominence patterns reinforced each other and were not sensitive to context. In children’s speech, the promin...

\Prose rhythm" is a widely observed but scarcely quantiied phenomenon. We describe an information-theoretic model for measuring the regularity of lexical stress in English texts, and use it in combination with trigram language models to demonstrate a relationship between the probability of word sequences in English and the amount of rhythm present in them. We nd that the stream of lexical stres...

This paper presents a two level lexical stress assignment model for out of vocabulary Slovenian words used in our text-to-speech system. First, each vowel (and consonant 'r') is determined, whether it is stressed or unstressed, and a type of lexical stress is assigned for every stressed vowel (and consonant 'r'). We applied a machine-learning technique (decision trees or boosted decision trees)...

Vietnamese compounds and phrasal constructions are investigated for phonetic correlates of lexical stress. Two series of experiments on the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Vietnamese compound words and their phrasal counterparts are reported here and in a companion paper (Nguyen & Ingram, this volume), involving paradigmatic (same position within a syntactic frame) and syntagmatic co...