The perception of prosody, like other aspects of speech perception, relies on a combination of bottom-up and top-down information. In the context of prominence perception, the present study explored the interaction of these two types of cues, and individual variation in their effects on listeners. In a “naïve prosody transcription” task, 120 listeners gave prominence ratings to verbs and object...

This study investigated speaker variation in the production of various acoustic cues of prominence, including durational and intensity measures. This study stems from our prior work where we used the Bayesian Information Criterion to determine whether each cue were gradiently or discretely associated with prominence. In our prior work, we found that features vary as to whether they are gradient...

Native-like production of intonational prominence is important for spoken language competency. Non-native speakers may have trouble producing prosodic variation in a second language (L2) and thus, problems in being understood. By identifying common sources of production error, we will be able to aid in the instruction of L2 speakers. In this paper we present results of a production study design...

This article is part of a much broader study of persuasive techniques in television news in Iran. As a very important part of IRIB news IRINN has been chosen for this study. If we assume that one of the most influential television news, the power of persuasion to influence the audience is very important. It seemed that choosing the highest hypothetical level of news and deconstructing it would ...

This article addresses two related questions regarding the cognitive processing of audiovisual markers of prominence in spoken utterances: (1) how important are visual cues to prominence from the face with respect to verbal cues? and (2) are there differences between different facial areas in their cue value for prosodic prominence? The first perception experiment tackles the relation between a...

This study examined the attractiveness of facial profiles. One hundred and two social science students (28 males and 74 females) rated the attractiveness of a series of silhouettes with normal, Class II or Class III profiles. A random sequence of 10 images included an image with the Eastman normal SNB value of 78 degrees, and images with SNB values of 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 degrees above and below ...

Psaroniocompsa incrustata (Lutz) is an antropophilic species widely distributed in Central and South America. It is the vector of Onchocerca volvulus in a Brazilian focus and has been considered a plague in several areas of this country. The objective of this study was to determine the number of larval instars and to describe the morphological variations and teratologies of a population of P. i...

There are several theories regarding what influences prominence assignment in English noun-noun compounds. We developed corpus-driven models for automatically predicting prominence assignment in noun-noun compounds using feature sets based on two such theories: the informativeness theory and the semantic composition theory. The evaluation of the prediction models indicate that though both of th...