The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the fine-grained phonetic details of German plosives which also cue the phonological fortis-lenis contrast. Closure durations were found to be longer at higher prosodic boundaries. There was also less glottal vibration in lenis plosives at higher prosodic boundaries. Voice onset time in lenis plosives was not affected by pros...

In this paper, the prosodic information, a very special and important feature in Mandarin speech, is used for Mandarin telephone speech utterance verification. A two-stage strategy, with recognition followed by verification, is adopted. For keyword recognition, 59 context-independent subsyllables, i.e., 22 m s and 37 FINAL’S in Mandarin speech, and one backgroundkilence model, are used as the b...

In automatic speech understanding, the division of continuously running speech into syntactic chunks is a great problem. Syntactic boundaries are often marked by prosodic means. For the training of statistic models for prosodic boundaries large databases are necessary. For the German Verb-mobil project (automatic speech{to{speech translation), we developed a syntactic-prosodic labeling scheme w...

This paper examines how non-expert listeners perceive prominence and prosodic boundaries in Korean using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) method, developed by Mo, Cole and Lee [9] for American English. While prominence is used to mark prosodically salient or “highlighted” words and phrases, prosodic boundaries demarcate units or “chunks” of speech to mirror the hierarchical relations among...

In this paper we study the effectiveness of prosodic features for speaker verification. We hypothesize that prosody is linked to linguistic units such as syllables and prosodic features can be better represented with reference to the syllabic sequence. For extracting prosodic features, speech is segmented into syllablelike regions using the knowledge of vowel onset points (VOP). We use a techni...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of prosodically-sensitive concatenative units for a Korean text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system. The diphones used are prosodically conditioned in the sense that a single conventional diphone is stored as different versions taken directly from the different prosodic domains of the prosodically labeled, read sentences. The four levels of the Korean...

In automatic speech understanding, the division of continuously running speech into syntactic chunks is a great problem. Syntactic boundaries are often marked by prosodic means. For the training of statistic models for prosodic boundaries large data-bases are necessary. For the GermanVerbmobil project (automatic speech{to{speech translation), we developed a syntactic-prosodic labeling scheme wh...

This paper is the first to examine the effect of prosodic features on coreference resolution in spoken discourse. We test features from different prosodic levels and investigate which strategies can be applied. Our results on the basis of manual prosodic labelling show that the presence of an accent is a helpful feature in a machine-learning setting. Including prosodic boundaries and determinin...

We propose a novel method of exploiting prosodic breaks in language modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR) based on the random forest language model (RFLM), which is a collection of randomized decision tree language models and can potentially ask any questions about the history in order to predict the future. We demonstrate how questions about prosodic breaks can be easily incorporated...

In this paper, we investigate prosodic alignment in task-based conversations. We use the HCRC Map Task Corpus and investigate how familiarity affects prosodic alignment and how task success is related to prosodic alignment. A variety of existing alignment measures is used and applied to our data. In particular, a windowed cross-correlation procedure, that has been used previously in visual beha...