Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information, including the type of speech act of an utterance (e.g., falling declarative vs. rising interrogative intonational tunes), the location of semantic focus (via prosodic prominence), and syntactic constituent structure (via prosodic phrasing). The syntactic/semantic functional dimensions (speech act, focus, constituency) are orthogonal...

The behaviour of the voice source characteristics in connected speech was studied. Voice source parameters were obtained by automatic inverse filtering, followed by automatic fitting of the LF-model to the data. Consistent relations between voice source parameters and prosody were observed.

Research into human communication through the spoken language is full of dichotomies that have often stood in the way of progress in the past, notably the distinction between phonetics and phonology, and more recently, and somewhat orthogonally, between prosody and articulation. The papers collected here make considerable advances in overcoming these restrictions, providing valuable contributio...

Previous work on the production and comprehension of focus-to-prosody mapping make different claims on the existence of a production-precedingcomprehension asymmetry in acquisition, whereby children pass through a stage of producing the right prosodic pattern but not using the focus-to-prosody mapping to the fullest extent in their comprehension, before reaching adult-like behaviour in both. Th...

This paper intends to explore the semantic prosody constructed in the commentary text of China’s National Publicity film, by using the appraisal framework, and to explain how the prosody stringing throughout the text assists to achieve the film’s communicative goal. Its main theoretical framework is based on Appraisal Theory and also combines the analysis of Tenor and Prosody (prosodic structur...

This paper describes techniques of scoring prosodic proficiency of English sentences spoken by Japanese. The multiple regression model predicts the prosodic proficiency using new prosodic measures based on the characteristics of Japanese novice learners of English. Prosodic measures are calculated by comparing prosodic parameters, such as F0, power and duration, of learner’s and native speaker’...

The perception value of intonation and voice quality is investigated for six affective states: anger, sadness, happiness, obviousness, doubt and irony. The main research question is whether the role of intonation and voice quality is equally important in the perception of studied affective states or whether one of them may be privileged. Six affective states were tested on utterances with natur...

Languages vary in the types of contexts that affect prosodic prominence. This paper reports on a production study investigating how different types of foci influence prosody in Polish. The results show that focus and givenness in Polish are both marked prosodically, with pitch and intensity as the main acoustic correlates. Polish patterns like English in showing prosodic focus marking in a broa...

Previous studies have proposed that, along with the final accent, the French phonological system includes an Initial Accent which has rhythmic functions. Descriptions of English prosody propose that an early accent marks Major Phonological Phrases. The present study investigates the structural and rhythmic functions of IA in French at various levels of phonological structure. Results on the occ...

In English, the focus of a sentence is an important factor in determining the prosody of an utterance. Some linguistic analyses of focus [9][10][11] claim that (1) prosodic representation of focus is determined by pitch accents, (2) the distribution of pitch accents is determined by the size of the focus constituent, and (3) one pro-sodic realization may be ambiguous for several focus constitue...