This paper presents some preliminary results of the OPLON project. It aimed at identifying early linguistic symptoms of cognitive decline in the elderly. This pilot study was conducted on a corpus composed of spontaneous speech sample collected from 39 subjects, who underwent a neuropsychological screening for visuo-spatial abilities, memory, language, executive functions and attention. A rich ...

Adult speakers of different free stress languages (e.g., English, Spanish) differ both in their sensitivity to lexical stress and in their processing of suprasegmental and vowel quality cues to stress. In a head-turn preference experiment with a familiarization phase, both 8-month-old and 12-month-old English-learning infants discriminated between initial stress and final stress among lists of ...

The human sensory system is capable to rapidly respond to novel input, allowing for quick allocation of attentional resources to the stimulus. In a similar manner, prominent words in speech seem to attract the listeners’ attention and facilitate or alter interpretation. Sentence prominence has been typically studied across languages by examining configurations of acoustic prosodic features duri...

In the feature extraction stage, features representing speaker information are extracted from the speech signal. In the present study LP residual derived from the speech data is used for training and testing and also processing of LP residual in time domain at subsegmental, segmental and suprasegmental levels. In the training phase, GMMs are built, one for each speaker, using the training data ...

There is much research on the syntax-semantics and syntax-phonology interaction. However, exact relation between prosodic patterns informational structure (as part of pragmatics) still to be investigated. In this empirical study, we challenge view that prosody pragmatics are two autonomous levels grammar. This paper an analysis narrative poem ‘Mending Wall’ recited by Robert Frost explore featu...

Using a multiple-deviant oddball paradigm, this study examined second graders' brain responses to Cantonese speech. We aimed to address the question of whether a change in a consonant or lexical tone could be automatically detected by children. We measured auditory mismatch responses to place of articulation and voice onset time (VOT), reflecting segmental perception, as well as Cantonese lexic...

The study provides a description of the phonological features projected in Manobo, which is spoken Jose Abad Santos, Davao Occidental, as an effort to monitor status and vitality language. In eliciting segmental suprasegmental features, respondents translated questionnaire, pre-determined word list Cebuano vocabularies sentences, it was documented through audio-recording. transcribed words were...

In this paper, we use prosodic information to improve the accuracy of our template-based automatic speech recognizer. Prosodic information is harvested adopting a data-driven approach. A number of prosodic features is extracted, then combined into major groups, and finally studied separately and together. All acoustic evidence, both segmental and suprasegmental, is modelled non-parametrically. ...

This study investigates the notion of perceptual distance among the Afro-Asiatic family. It is based on a “same/different” task involving French subjects and items from 10 languages or dialects (8 Afro-Asiatic: Amharic, Moroccan Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Tarifit Berber, Touareg Berber, Hausa, Hebrew, Somali and 2 intruders: Armenian and Turkish). The task was judged very difficult by the subjec...