This work presents the prosodic analysis of Parenthetical Units in spoken Italian and German within theoretical framework Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), which defines such textual units as Parentheses (PARs), i.e. devices used by speaker to add information utterance on a secondary level text. Data were extracted from Minicorpus DB-IPIC resource FOLK corpus. Linguistic content distribu...

This paper explores how the inand out-domain probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) speaker verification behave when enrolment and verification lengths are reduced. Experiment studies have found that when full-length utterance is used for evaluation, in-domain PLDA approach shows more than 28% improvement in EER and DCF values over out-domain PLDA approach and when short utterances a...

In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-...

This paper deals with F0 declination in Russian. The study was conducted using statistical data derived from the Corpus of Professionally Read Speech. The results confirm the relationship between F0 slope and the utterance length for Russian. At the same time they reveal a) individual strategies in preplanning declination slope of the phrase or utterance; b) strong dependency of the F0 slope on...

Elicited imitation was used to determine whether young children's inconsistent production of sentence subjects was due to limitations in their knowledge of English or in their ability to access and use that knowledge. Nineteen young children (age range = 1 year 10 months to 2 years 8 months; Mean Length of Utterance [MLU] range = 1.28 to 4.93) repeated sentences that varied in length, structure...

We have developed a method to determine whether a user utterance is directed at the system or not. A spoken dialogue system should not respond to audio inputs that are not directed at it (i.e., a user’s mutter), and it therefore needs to detect such inputs to avoid unsuitable responses. We classify the two cases by logistic regression based on a feature set including utterance timing, utterance...

Durational contrasts can be used to signal prosodic boundaries (utterance-final lengthening) and discourse focus (accentual lengthening). Durational differences can also signal phonemic vowel length contrast such as in non-rhotic Australian English where vowel length distinguishes lexical items (such as, cart /k :t/ and cut /k t/). This raises the question of how and when children acquire phone...