In this paper we investigate a new source of information for syntactic category acquisition: sentence type (question, declarative, imperative). Sentence type correlates strongly with intonation patterns in most languages; we hypothesize that these intonation patterns are a valuable signal to a language learner, indicating different syntactic patterns. To test this hypothesis, we train a Bayesia...

The present study attempts to analyze intonation in Central Kurdish, the Sorani variety spoken Slemani Iraqi Kurdistan. Intonation refers pitch fluctuations used by a speaker express meanings. To carry out analysis, embraces theory of Cognitive Phonology. claim that there is relationship between linguistic expression and its meaning. Accordingly, it hypothesized meaning an utterance shaped part...

This paper examines how intonation affects the interpretation of disjunctive questions. The semantic effect of a question is taken to be three-fold. First, it raises an issue. In the tradition of inquisitive semantics, we model this by assuming that a question proposes several possible updates of the common ground (several possibilities for short) and invites other participants to help establis...

The present paper reports our preliminary attempt on modeling intonation using underlying pitch targets. The underlying pitch targets were derived using a nonlinear regression technique under the pitch target approximation model [17, 19]. We assume that the use of underlying pitch targets can capture the most important intonation patterns while maintaining critical predictive power. Another imp...

A highly pervasive phenomenon in natural languages is ellipsis. It is commonly believed that the presence of ellipsis is one of the main reasons why natural language is as ambiguous as it is. If lexical material is left unpronounced, a hearer must rely on other parts of the sentence, on contextual information and on intonation to recover the unpronounced material. Because there may be different...

Accurate intonation modeling has become a vital part of modern day speech synthesis systems. This is especially true for tonal languages such as isiZulu, where the intonation of an utterance not only influences the perceived naturalness of the synthetic voice, but may also influence its semantics. In this work we explore the INTSINT intonation modeling algorithm and its application to an isiZul...