In this study we show how hydrogen and helium lines modelling can be used to make a diagnostic of active and eruptive prominences. One motivation for this work is to identify the physical conditions during prominence activation and eruption. Hydrogen and helium lines are key in probing different parts of the prominence structure and inferring the plasma parameters. However, the interpretation o...

The current study investigates the relationship between perceived syllable prominence and the F0 contour in terms of the parameters of a linguistically motivated model of German intonation based on the Fujisaki formula. A subcorpus of the Bonn Prosodic Database was analyzed using the F0 model, and normalized log syllable durations were calculated. Analysis shows that, for accented syllables, pr...

In previous research we showed that the priming paradigm can be used to significantly alter the prominence ratings of subjects. In that study we only looked at the changes in the subjects’ ratings. In the present study, we analyzed the acoustic parameters of the stimuli used in the priming study and investigated the correlation between prominence ratings and acoustic parameters. The results sho...

This study investigates the relationship between sentence prominence and the predictability of word-specific statistical descriptors of prosody. We extend from an earlier wordinvariant model by studying a model that marks words as prominent if the acoustic prosodic features differ from their expected values during the lexemes. To test the approach, the most common acoustic features associated w...

We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cos...

This paper describes a first step towards the automatic classification of prominence (as defined by naive listeners). As a result of a listening experiment each word in 500 sentences was marked with a rating scale between ‘0’ (non-prominent) and ‘10’ (very prominent). These prominence labels are compared with the following acoustical features: loudness of each vowel, and F0 range and duration o...

This paper describes the relationships between perceived prominence as a gradual value and some acoustic-prosodic parameters. Prominence is used as an intermediate parameter in a speech synthesis system. A corpus of American English utterances was constructed by measuring and annotating various linguistic, acoustic and perceptual parameters and features. The investigation of the corpus revealed...

Although some phonetic variability is inevitable in speech production, adult speech is fairly consistent. Thus, part of becoming a competent adult speaker is learning to appropriately limit the variability in one’s speech. It is generally believed that phonology is mastered relatively early; however, this does not take into account the refinement of articulation required to reign in the variabi...