We explored a database covering seven dialects of British and Irish English and three different styles of speech to find acoustic correlates of prominence. We built classifiers, trained the classifiers on human prominence/nonprominence judgments, and then evaluated how well they behaved. The classifiers operate on 452 ms windows centered on syllables, using different acoustic measures. By compa...

Acoustic and articulatory measurements were made of utterances containing seven syllables using the vowel /aI/ with varying degrees of prominence, including contrastive emphasis/focus. A trained phonetician judged the amount of prominence for each of the seven syllables. The findings show a significant correlation between amount of jaw opening for each of the target syllables and perceived prom...

Topographic prominence can be defined as the perceived difference in height between an individual and their surroundings within a defined neighborhood. Because this difference can be seen as an element of visual/political control, topographic prominence may provide clues to perceived social hierarchy and rank. This study uses ARC/GRID to discover topographic prominence in a landscape at a varie...