Prosody is an important aspect of speech that current text to speech synthesis systems fail to mimic in a convincing or natural way[1, 2, 3, 4]. This paper describes research on a partial system for prosodic synthesis using easily derived low level syntactic information. A computer program has been developed that can annotate unseen text with prosodic stress and tone marks using the sequence of...

The roles which word class (open/closed) and sentential stress play in the sentence comprehension processes of both agrammatic (Broca's) aphasics and normal listeners were examined with a word monitoring task. Overall, normal listeners responded more quickly to stressed than to unstressed items, but showed no effect of word class. Aphasics also responded more quickly to stressed than to unstres...

French is characterized by the presence of a final stress at the end of rhythmic groups. Lexical processing could be facilitated for words whose right boundary also corresponds to the rhythmicgroup boundary. Sentences were constructed with a target syllable at various positions relative to word and rhythmic-group boundaries. These sentences were presented to French listeners (experiment 1) and ...

Infants' earliest attempts at word segmentation appear to be guided by a single source of information (e.g., English-learners initially rely on the predominant stress pattern of words). This initial strategy successfully identifies many potential words in the input, but mis-segments others. However, simply breaking the input into smaller chunks helps learners to identify other possible cues to ...

Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is shaped by experience listening to a specific language or language type. This issue was explored by comparing segmentation of bi-syllabic words in monolingual and bilingual 7.5-month-old learners of French and English. In a native-language condition, monolingual infants segmented bi-syllabic words wi...

This paper shows one of the methods used for grammar checking, as it is being developed in the frame of the EC funded project LATESLAV -Language Technology li)r Slavic Languages (PECO 2824). The languages under consideration in the project Czech and Bulgarian are both free word order languages, therefore it is not sufficient to use only simple pattern based methods for error checking. The empha...

The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed and unified analysis word stress in Najdi Arabic (NA), variety spoken Najd, located the central region Saudi Arabia. Regular stress, seemingly exceptional cases, also variations within NA itself are all accounted for simple straightforward manner. proposed based on two principles. First, unlike previous studies that employ three-way weight dist...

Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is shaped by experience listening to a specific language or language type. This issue was explored by comparing segmentation of bi-syllabic words in monolingual and bilingual 7.5-month-old learners of French and English. In a native-language condition, monolingual infants segmented bi-syllabic words wi...

French is characterized by the presence of a final stress at the end of rhythmic groups. Lexical processing could be facilitated for words whose right boundary also corresponds to the rhythmicgroup boundary. Sentences were constructed with a target syllable at various positions relative to word and rhythmic-group boundaries. These sentences were presented to French listeners (experiment 1) and ...

In a syllable monitoring experiment, Greek and English speakers (N = 20 per language) monitored for [ma] embedded in Greek real and nonce words; [ma] was word-initial, word-medial or word-final, and stressed, unstressed or rhythmically stressed. Both groups spotted stressed [ma] faster than unstressed [ma]; unstressed [ma] was spotted faster by Greek than English participants. Rhythmically stre...