This chapter addresses the debate concerning status of nonmanuals (head, face, body) as prosodic or not by exploring in detail how prosody is structured speech and what might be parallels differences sign. Prosody divided into two parts, rhythmic phrasing (timing, syllables, stress), intonation. To maximize accessibility, each part, an introduction to known for presented, followed and/or claime...

This study examines the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communicative efficiency conveyed through prosody. A new assessment method for evaluating productive prosodic skills in Dutch speaking dysarthric patients was devised and tested on 36 individuals (18 controls, 18 PD patients). Three professional listeners judged the intended meanings in four communicative functions of Dutch prosody: ...

The present study examined the relative contributions of prosody and semantic context in the implicit processing of emotions from spoken language. In three separate tasks, we compared the degree to which happy and sad emotional prosody alone, emotional semantic context alone, and combined emotional prosody and semantic information would prime subsequent decisions about an emotionally congruent ...

The paper presents the module for automatic prosody generation within a system for automatic synthesis of high-quality speech based on arbitrary text in Hebrew. The high quality of synthesis is due to the high accuracy of automatic prosody generation, enabling the introduction of elements of natural sentence prosody of Hebrew. Automatic morphological annotation of text is based on the applicati...

Some dialogues are perceived as running more smoothly than others. To some extent that impression could be related to how well speakers adapt their prosody to each other. Adaptation in prosody can be signaled by the use of pitch accents that indicate how utterances are structurally related to those of the interlocutor (prosodic function) or by copying the interlocutor's prosodic features (proso...

Prosody is one of the most undervalued components of language, despite fulfilling manifold purposes: it can, for instance, help assign the correct meaning to compounds such as ‘white house’ (linguistic function), or help a listener understand how a speaker feels (emotional function). However, brain based models that take into account the role prosody plays in dynamic speech comprehension are st...

The paper presents a unit selection-based speech synthesis approach for Chinese Mandarin. Unit selection-based approach generates speech by directly connecting pre-recorded speech units. In this approach, a corpus is used as a source unit inventory. A feature vector is defined to describe each unit. To generate speech, the feature vector of the target unit is first calculated. During synthesis,...

In two visual word eye tracking studies, we investigated the influence of prosody and case marking on children’s and adults’ thematic role assignment. We assigned an SVO/ OVS-biasing (vs. neutral) prosodic contour to unambiguously case marked German subject-verb-object (SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences respectively. Scenes depicted ambiguous action events (e.g., donkey-paints->eleph...

In the decade that has passed since the introduction of the ToBI system for the transcription of prosody, speech technology has moved out of the laboratory and into commercial applications on several fronts. However, virtually none of the commercial products have made large-scale use of prosody. Nevertheless, researchers in both recognition and synthesis continue to agree that better utilizatio...