Prosody is used to improve the performance of the automatic speech translation system VERBMOBIL [8]. In our earlier work we have developed efficient and robust word-based features that describe F0, energy, speaking rate, and pauses. These features were used to classify prosodic events. We achieved the best recognition results with 95-dimensional feature vectors that describe a context of +/2 wo...

In this paper, we discuss the interplay of factors that influence the intonational marking of contrast in Dutch. In particular, we examine how prominence is expressed at the prosodic level when semantically abnormal information conflicts with contrastive information. For this purpose, we conducted a production experiment in Dutch in which speakers described scenes containing fruits with unnatur...

“Rikimi” is a “pressed-type” voice quality that appears in Japanese conversational speech for expressing paralinguistic information related to emotional or attitudinal behaviors of the speaker. We conducted acoustic, electroglottographic (EGG) and paralinguistic analyses on speech segments including “rikimi”, extracted from spontaneous dialogue speech data. “Rikimi” may be accompanied by severa...

A working database needs tools to transcribe and label at both phonetic and prosodic levels. While the proposed phonetic transcription system is a simplified from of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) following the SAMPA guidelines; the prosodic labeling system is an elaborated form of the ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) framework adopted for Mandarin. In particular, the proposed prosodic ...

This paper describes the relationships between perceived prominence as a gradual value and some acoustic-prosodic parameters. Prominence is used as an intermediate parameter in a speech synthesis system. A corpus of American English utterances was constructed by measuring and annotating various linguistic, acoustic and perceptual parameters and features. The investigation of the corpus revealed...

This paper presents the characteristic differences of acoustic and linguistic features observed in different spoken dialogue situations: human-human vs. human-machine interactions. We compare the acoustic and linguistic features of the user’s speech to a spoken dialogue system and to a human-operator in several landmark setting tasks for a car navigation system. It has been pointed out that spe...

The following is concerned with the linguistic components of expressive speech synthesis. It tries to fulfil the role that Huckvale (2002) assigns to the linguist in speech science for speech synthesis. Linguists find models and parameters for the description of language. The semiotic foundations for the study of expressive herein have to be modelled upon a concept that every sign has got a con...

I investigate the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence and boundary, as they are perceived by naïve listeners, in spontaneous speech from American English (Buckeye corpus). Prosodic prominence and phrasing serve different functions in speech communication: prosodic phrase boundaries demarcate speech chunks that typically cohere semantically, while prominences encode focus and possibly als...

Speech prosody has traditionally been analyzed in terms of acoustic features. Although visual features have been shown to enhance linguistic processing, the conventional view is that facial and body gesture information in oral (non-signed) languages tends to be redundant and has the role of helping the hearer recover the meaning of an utterance. Though prosodic information in face-to-face commu...