The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...

This paper shows how focus prosody of South Kyungsang Korean interacts with the prosodic structure of the dialect. Based on the prosodic structure defined by intonation, it is claimed that the domain of lexical pitch accent assignment is a Prosodic Word, but the prosodic domain of focus, or the realization of focus prominence, is an Accentual Phrase. This model can explain the phenomenon of mis...

The structure of a discourse is reflected in many aspects of its linguistic realization, including its lexical, prosodic, syntactic, and semantic nature. Multiparty dialog contains a particular kind of discourse structure, the dialog act (DA). Like other types of structure, the dialog act sequence of a conversation is also reflected in its lexical, prosodic, and syntactic realization. This pape...

Urdu/Hindi has SOV default word order and an immediately preverbal default focus position [1, 2]. When focus is syntactically determined relative to the verb, verb focus is difficult to realize by position. We were therefore interested in the interplay between syntax and prosody with respect to verb focus in languages such as Urdu/Hindi and investigated the prosody associated with verb focus in...

The aim of this study is to relate spectral realization of vowels and prosodic hierarchy in continuous speech. The IRISA speech alignment system is used and formant values of oral vowels are automatically measured in a total of 500,000 segments from around 30 hours of journalistic broadcast speech in French. The link between the duration of vowels and their spectral realization (through their f...

The current study examines the realization and distribution of high (H) tones in Bengali across different sentence types and under varying focus domain sizes, to show that Bengali tonally marks three prosodic phrases above the word instead of two – Intonation Phrases (IP), Intermediate Phrases (ip), and Accentual Phrases (AP) – and that focus realization can be derived without the lexically-spe...

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate whether post-focus tonal realization is constrained by prosodic structure in Shanghai Chinese (SH). Previous studies have shown that in SH, focus expanded the f0 range of bi-syllabic tone sandhi words while pitch register lowering, instead of pitch range compression, was consistently found on post-focus bi-syllabic tone sandhi words. The ...

The relation between prosodic constituents of different levels (the prosodic hierarchy) and the realization of phonemes is investigated in French and German broadcast speech. Four levels of prosodic categories are defined and the boundaries are automatically derived using syntactic chunking and forced alignment. We show that the higher a vowel position within the prosodic structure, the more st...