This work focuses on the relationship between prosodic and syntactic domains in order to investigate whether there is a preferred syntactic domain of tonal units and whether there is a preferred prosodic domain of syntactic constituents. Two independent analyses of phonetic prosodic boundaries of syntactic constituents and of syntactic structure of prosodic constituents in Italian spontaneous d...

As the basic prosodic unit, the prosodic word influences the naturalness and the intelligibility greatly. Although the research shows that the lexicon word are greatly different from the prosodic word, the lexicon word still provides the important cues for the prosodic word forming. The rhythm constraint is another important factor for the prosodic word prediction. Some lexicon word length patt...

In our paper we examine the usage of prosodic features in speech recognition, with a special attention payed to agglutinating and fixed stress languages. The used prosodic features, acoustic-prosodic preprocessing, and segmentation in terms of prosodic units are presented in details. We use the expression ”prosodic unit” in order to make a difference from prosodic phrases, which are longer. We ...

Recently, speaker verification systems using different kinds of prosodic features have been proposed. Although it has been shown that most of these speaker verification systems can improve system performance using score-level fusion with stateof-the-art cepstral-based systems, a systematic comparison of the prosodic modelling algorithms used in these prosodic systems has not yet been performed....

A solution is proposed for rapidly adapting prosodic models to a new voice or a new application. First, a prosodic alphabet that is supported by linguistic knowledge is identified at the acoustic level. The observation of the realisation of prosodic events on the acoustic corpus allows classes of breaks, F0 shapes and accents to be constructed and automatic transcription rules to be written. Th...

Variation in pitch, amplitude and rhythm adds crucial paralinguistic information to human speech. Such prosodic cues can reveal information about the meaning or emphasis of a sentence or the emotional state of the speaker. To examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to prosodic cues is language independent and not human specific, we tested prosody perception in a controlled experiment with zebra...