Quantitative models of intonation in a variety of languages typically specify a long-range downtrend across the sentence that provides a declining backdrop for the steeper rises and falls of more local pitch events such as accents and word tones. Several studies of this “declination” in English and several other languages have isolated a component of somewhat steeper decline that covers only th...

In this study, we investigated speaker’s intentions that the listeners perceive through subtly different sentence-final intonations. Approximately 2,000 sentence utterances were recorded and the fundamental frequency (F0) contours at the last vowel of those sentences were classified through one of the standard clustering algorithms. There found various F0 contours, namely, not only simple risin...

While recent crosslinguistic studies have shown that the degree of speaker’s commitment or certainty is encoded intonationally either in a gradient or categorical fashion, our understanding of how French speakers use Intonational-Phrase (IP) final contours to signal their degree of certainty is limited. This paper investigates the contribution of a penultimate peak contour in French to convey s...

The paper investigates the F0 contours of the nine citation tones [55, 33, 22, 21, 25, 23, 5, 3, 2] in Hong Kong Cantonese that occur on the test syllables in the sentence-final position in the declarative and question sentences. Results show that (i) the citation tones in the declarative context are noticeably different from the same tones in the question context; (ii) the differences between ...

The paper combines the Fujisaki commandresponse model and the ToBI convention to analyze the English sentence prosody produced by American native speakers and Korean and Chinese English learners. The model parameters were extracted by FujiParaEditor for nine short sentences produced by three groups of speakers. The ToBI-tanscribed results were compared with the model parameters. Results show th...

We present a new approach for resolving occlusions in augmented reality. The main interest is that it does not require 3D reconstruction of the considered scene. Our idea is to use a contour based approach and to label each contour point as being “behind” or “in front of”, depending on whether it is in front of or behind the virtual object. This labeling step only requires that the contours can...