In two short stories three text characteristics have been implemented independent of each other: information status, content type, and boundary strength. Thus, each characteristic could be assessed for its unique effect on prosody. Both stories were read aloud by ten speakers. No effects were found for pitch range and articulation rate, but pause duration did vary systematically with each of th...

This article investigates whether newsreaders exploit their expressive style for signalling different types of communicatively relevant information. The study reported upon here investigates whether these speakers use their facial expressions to ‘‘package’’ the content of their messages so that they reflect the relative importance, the emotional connotation and the intended audience of the news...

This paper investigates the prosodic patterns of non-lexical response tokens in a Swedish call-in radio show. The feedback of a professional speaker was investigated to give insight in how to build a simulated active listener that could encourage its users to continue talking. Possible domains for such systems include customer care and second language learning. The prosodic analysis of the non-...

The aim of the work to be reported here is to explore the utility of prosodic information in language identification and discrimination tasks. The purpose of this study is to see whether prosodic patterns can be considered as reliable acoustic cues for the discrimination of Arabic dialects by investigating, via a perceptual experiment, if listeners are successful in identifying the Arabic diale...

This paper examined the acoustic properties of the pitch accent of South Kyungsang Korean, focusing on generational differences. Kyungsang Korean has lexical pitch accents, whereas standard Seoul Korean does not. However, whether the pitch accents are maintained by younger Kyungsang speakers is questionable given the influence of Seoul Korean. Through comparisons between older and younger speak...

This paper presents a methodology for evaluating the performance of synthetic prosody. The methodology focusses on the functional equivalence of natural and synthetic prosodic contours in terms of both distinctiveness and coherence. A perceptual experiment was designed to test the performance in terms of distinctiveness for a simple phrasing task. Results demonstrate the importance of a phonolo...

Listeners have been shown to distinguish text read aloud from spontaneous speech, with a range of prosodic features suggested as cues to speech style. However, significant variation is seen across studies, both in speech elicitation methods and in the nature of listeners’ orientation to prosodic cues. We asked whether listeners could distinguish spontaneous ‘map task’ speech from lexically iden...

Speech prosody has traditionally been analyzed in terms of acoustic features. Even though visual features and gestures have been shown to help and enhance linguistic processing, the conventional view is that facial and body gesture information in oral (non-sign) languages tends to be redundant and has the role of helping the hearer recover the meaning of an utterance. We conducted two perceptio...

Recent work has shown that prosodic information has a number of important effects on human sentence processing, including effects on the semantic integration of clauses (Schafer 1997). In an effort to learn more about the nature of these prosodic effects, we ran an experiment that manipulated not only prosody, but also the type of initial subordinating conjunction, which we predicted might have...

Semantic prosody is typically referred to as an evaluative function of certain words or multiword items appearing within collocates positive negative meaning. The present study deals with the semantic (context properties) extended lexical units (ELUs) according psycholinguistic variables ‘valence’ (emotional positivity), ‘arousal’ (excitement, mood-enhancement), and ‘concreteness’. object inves...