Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder due to a microdeletion in chromosome 7, is described as displaying an intriguing socio-cognitive phenotype. Deficits in prosody production and comprehension have been consistently reported in behavioral studies. It remains, however, to be clarified the neurobiological processes underlying prosody processing in WS. This study aimed at...

The general aim of this paper is to elucidate the nature of the tonal neutralization and the relationship between the neutral tone and (weak) stress in Chinese. Although there has been increased recent interest in various prosodic aspects of this language, most of the previous studies mainly focused on the interaction of tone and intonation. Relatively little attention has been paid to stress, ...

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...

In the current paper, the Vietnamese prosody was analyzed in order to produce a natural Vietnamese synthesizer. Word duration in texts recorded by various human voices was measured to test several hypotheses for logical segments of the utterances in a sentence. The sound files were analyzed and interpreted by several statistical calculations.

In this paper we report on our research on the contextual meaning and prosody of three interjections ey, wa, and oh. A detailed qualitative-contextual analysis of our corpus shows that these interjections share important contextual and prosodic characteristics due to their similar functional status with respect to new or unexpected information. We show that there are also significant difference...

This paper compares the production of stress patterns in various types of compounds by English natives and by L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers. English natives (ENs) systematically produced idiomatic compounds with fore-stress (Strong-Weak) patterns, and so did the second language learners (L2ers) (although to a lesser extent). Significant differences were found between the two groups in their st...

This study attempts to investigate the change of naturalness impression for the Japanese utterance by Japanese as foreign language learners (JFL) before and after pronunciation training (shadowing / repeating), and to discuss the crucial prosodic cue for the naturalness judgment. The speech of 8 JFL learners before and after pronunciation training was used, and their durational pattern, pitch p...

Studies of the relationship between prosody and the topic structure of longer discourses have tended to focus on intonational cues, most specifically fundamental frequency (F0). However, this may limit the kinds of topic structure it is possible to identify. A case study of two speakers shows that including speech rate along with F0 factors in an analysis of the prosody of topic structure can b...

Suffixes can surface or can be suppressed depending on context in Korean. Shin (1982) argues that the case markermarked phrases deliver new information, while the case marker-suppressed phrases given information. The tonal pattern of the Accentual Phrase in Korean, LHLH, is not specific to morphological constituents within the phrase but is a property of the phrase (Jun 1993). Given that prosod...