Previous studies of speech and gesture in intonational languages generally suggested that prosodic and gestural prominence are aligned with one another, pitch accented/ stressed syllable or the peak fundamental frequency (F0) of it being the prosodic anchor. A logical question to raise would be whether such alignment exists in tonal languages without lexical stress. To answer the question, this...

Prosody is a phenomenon that is crucial for numerous fields of speech research, accenting the importance of having a robust prosody model. A class of intonation models based on the physiology of pitch production are especially attractive for their inherent multilingual support. These models rely on an accurate model of muscle activation. Traditionally they have used the 2nd order spring-damper-...

Predicting the degree of nativeness of a student's utterance is an important issue in computer-aided language learning. This task has been addressed by many studies focusing on the segmental assessment of the speech signal. To achieve improved correlations between human and automatic nativeness scores, other aspects of speech should also be considered, such as prosody. The goal of this study is...

In this paper we report on our research on the pragmaticcontextual 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 d...

This study investigates the cumulative effect of (non-)native intonation, rhythm, and speech rate in utterances produced by Spanish learners of Dutch on Dutch native listeners’ perceptions. In order to assess the relative contribution of these language-specific properties to perceived accentedness and comprehensibility, speech produced by Spanish learners of Dutch was manipulated using transpla...

This paper presents some preliminary results of a post doctoral research project directed towards the prosodic and nonverbal deficiencies of Frenchand Finnishspeaking youngsters with Asperger Syndrome. More precisely, the paper is focussed on the salient prosodic features that characterise the speech of the Finnishspeaking informants of the project. The term ‘prosody’ is conceived here in a lar...