The aim of this paper is to examine effects on syllable prominence exerted by word and phrase boundaries, lexical stress, and sentence focus, and by the interactions between these factors. In a production study, German verb prefixes potentially forming prosodic minimal word pairs were systematically placed in a set of different contexts. Acoustic analyses showed a consistent effect of lexical s...

The aim of this study is to determine whether fluent and non-fluent aphasics preserve the acoustic marks of lexical stress in a repetition task involving regular oxytone and paroxytone disyllabic Spanish words in isolation. Acoustic analyses of each syllable (duration, F0, intensity) were performed. These data were then subjected to mixed-effects regression analyses, separately for oxytones and...

Infants develop different kinds of long-term linguistic representation as early as in their first year of life. We examined the interaction of early lexical access and prosodic processing. It is proposed that familiar word forms are stored in a protolexicon before linking any concepts to them, enabling early (proto)lexical segmentation from fluent speech. Additionally, previous results strength...

Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have difficulty producing native-like English stress contrasts. Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving manipulation of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most probl...

A prominence model is proposed for enhancing prosodic features in automatic lexical stress and pitch accent detection. We make use of a loudness model and incorporate differential pitch values to improve conventional features. Experiments show that these new prosodic features can improve the detection of lexical stress and pitch accent by about 6%. We further employ a prominence model to take i...

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the role of suprasegmental information in the processing of spoken words. All primes consisted of truncated spoken Dutch words. Recognition of visually presented word targets was facilitated by prior auditory presentation of the first two syllables of the same words as primes, but only if they were appropriately stressed (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by ...

This study is to investigate the acquisition of the English stress system by Chinese adult second language learners whose native language is of a different type from that of English. In the present study, twenty college non-English majors participated in three tasks. Three factors or exactly syllabic structure, lexical class, and stress patterns of known words contributing to the acquisition of...

Three male American English talkers spoke words that differed in lexical stress, and sentences that differed in phrasal stress, while video and movements of the face were recorded. In a production study, stressed vs. unstressed syllables from these utterances were compared along many measures of facial movement, which were generally larger and faster. In a visual perception study, 16 perceivers...

This paper examines an approach of using lexical stress models to improve the speech recognition performance on spontaneous telephone speech. We analyzed the correlation of various pitch, energy, and duration measurements with lexical stress on a large corpus of spontaneous utterances, and identified the most informative features of stress using classification experiments. We incorporated the s...