One of the infant’s first tasks in language acquisition is to discover the words embedded in a mostly continuous speech stream. This learning problem might be solved by using distributional cues to word boundaries—for example, by computing the transitional probabilities between sounds in the language input and using the relative strengths of these probabilities to hypothesize word boundaries. T...

This paper tests whether listeners are able to use the prosodic characteristics of speech to differentiate between alternative interpretations of syntactically ambiguous stimuli. Most existing research has either employed off-line tasks or provided adequate syntactic information for the listener to recognise ambiguity but inadequate prosodic information to resolve it. In incorporating controls ...

This paper reports a study of attitude manifestations in video blogs. We describe the manual annotation of speaker attitudes in a corpus of over 130 video blogs and present an analysis of prosodic and visual cues in relation to attitude states. We use machine learning techniques for the automatic prediction of attitudes from prosodic and visual features in video blogs and compare the performanc...

In languages with variable focus positions, prominent elements tend to be emphasised by prosodic cues (e.g. English). If a language prefers a given prosodic pattern, i.e. sentence-final nuclear accents, like Spanish, the prosodic realisation of broad focus might not differ from that of narrow and contrastive focus. The relevance of prosodic focus marking was tested in Hungarian were focus typic...

This paper reports the results of an empirical study which examined the discrimination and identification of prosodic variations by native and non-native speakers of Japanese. The data support the idea that recognizing prosodic cues is easier than associating the correct interpretations with them. This result is in keeping with first language acquisition studies showing that children acquire ac...

Normalized frequency data of X-JToBI prosodic labels were used to automatically discriminate 4 speech registers –academic presentation, simulated public speaking, dialogue, and reproduction speech– of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). It turned out that the use of prosodic label frequency information and speaking rate could achieve more than 85% accuracy (closed data). It also turned ou...

This work focuses on the relationship between prosodic and syntactic domains in order to investigate whether there is a preferred syntactic domain of tonal units and whether there is a preferred prosodic domain of syntactic constituents. Two independent analyses of phonetic prosodic boundaries of syntactic constituents and of syntactic structure of prosodic constituents in Italian spontaneous d...

This article discusses a perception experiment to investigate the relation between auditory and visual cues for marking prosodic prominence. The methodology makes use of a reaction-time experiment. For this experiment, recordings of a sentence with 3 accents were systematically manipulated in such a way that auditory and visual markers of prominence were either congruent (occurring on the same ...

This article discusses a perception experiment to investigate the relation between auditory and visual cues for marking prosodic prominence. The methodology makes use of a reaction-time experiment. For this experiment, recordings of a sentence with 3 accents were systematically manipulated in such a way that auditory and visual markers of prominence were either congruent (occurring on the same ...

We present the results of a series of machine learning experiments aimed at exploring the differences and similarities in the production of turn-taking cues in American English and Argentine Spanish. An analysis of prosodic features automatically extracted from 21 dyadic conversations (12 En, 9 Sp) revealed that, when signaling Holds, speakers of both languages tend to use roughly the same comb...