An acoustic study was conducted to investigate the melodic properties of prosodic boundary markers in the resolution of Syntactic Structural Ambiguity (SSA) in Mandarin and French. Based on the experimental results, I present the following arguments: as a well-documented marker of discourse junctures in other languages [1], [6], [7], [17], [18], [21], pitch reset is also used within the sentenc...

Repetition disfluencies are among the most frequent type of disfluency in conversational speech, accounting for over 20% of disfluencies, yet they do not generally lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. We propose that parallel prosodic features in the REP and ALT intervals of the repetition disfluency provide strong perceptual cues that signal the repetition to the listener. We repo...

Detecting levels of interest from speakers is a new problem in Spoken Dialog Understanding with significant impact on real world business applications. Previous work has focused on the analysis of traditional acoustic signals and shallow lexical features. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical fusion learning model that takes feedback from previous multistream predictions of prominent s...

This paper focuses on the users’ signaling of information status in human-machine interactions, and in particular looks at the role prosody may play in this respect. Using a corpus of interactions with two Dutch spoken dialogue systems, prosodic correlates of users’ disconfirmations were investigated. In this corpus, disconfirmations may serve as a signal to ‘go on’ in one context and as a sign...

Complex disfluencies that involve the repetition or correction of words are frequent in conversational speech, with repetition disfluencies alone accounting for over 20% of disfluencies. These disfluencies generally do not lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. We propose that the frequent occurrence of parallel prosodic features in the reparandum (REP) and alteration (ALT) intervals...

Two prosodic databases were annotated with linguistic information using SGML (Standard General Markup Language), one database of American English and one of Modern Standard German. Only information that might have prosodic correlates was annotated. Pho-netic and morphological information was supplied by automatic tools and then hand corrected. Semantic and pragmatic information was inserted by ...

Three experiments investigated possible acoustic determinants of the infant listening preference for motherese speech found by Fernald (1985). To test the hypothesis that the intonation of motherese speech was sufficient to elicit this preference, it was necessary to eliminate lexical content and to isolate the three maior acoustic correlates of intonation: (1) fundamental frequency (Fo), or pi...

In this work, a spontaneous speech corpus of broadcasted television material in European Portuguese (EP) is presented. We decided to name it ProGmatica as it is meant to combine prosody information under a pragmatic framework. Our purpose is to analyse, describe and predict the prosodic patterns that are involved in speech acts and discourse events. It is also our goal to relate both prosody an...

Speech communication has several steps of encoding, transmission, and decoding. In each step, various acoustic distortions are inevitably induced by non-linguistic factors such as differences of age, gender, microphone, line, room, auditory characteristics of a hearer’s ears, etc. In spite of this large variability, humans can perform very precise speech processing. Recently, the first author p...

Basic research into the relationship between intonation and speaker’s intentions about syntax and information structure addresses whether, when, and how speakers use prosodic information to signal linguistic and paralinguistic meaning. Speakers use prosody for a range of functions in communication: to mark the difference between immediately relevant vs. background information; to express contra...