Our study investigates the potential of modeling the vocal expression of human attitudes based on a limited set of prosodic and voice quality parameters and their subsequent synthetic realization. Four attitudes (uncertainty, sincerity, surprise and doubt) were taken into account. For two utterances, a set of acoustic prosodic (F0, intensity, duration) and voice quality parameters (jitter, shim...

A production study is presented that investigates the effects of word order and information structural context on the prosodic realization of declarative sentences in Hindi. Previous work on Hindi intonation has shown that: (i) non-final content words bear rising pitch accents (Moore 1965, Dyrud 2001, Nair 1999); (ii) focused constituents show greater pitch excursion and longer duration and tha...

In this article we discuss some empirical results concerning the impact of different levels of information status (i.e. referents and words, respectively) on the prosodic realization of referential expressions in annotated corpora of read and spontaneous speech. Both at the referential and at the lexical level not only given and new but also intermediate classes of givenness/novelty have to be ...

While the use of sentence-final discourse particles (SFPs) is typically linked to specific interactional or social functions, their realization is also associated with particular positional and intonational requirements. This raises the question of whether the use of SFPs may be partly driven by the phonological characteristics of sentence-final contexts. In [1], we showed that Singapore Englis...

This study contributes to the issue of syntax-prosody-semantics interaction in child speech. It focuses on the prosodic realization of contextually-defined direct objects in a language allowing object scrambling. The empirical data are collected from 3-4-year-old children acquiring Ukrainian. The children’s speech samples were analyzed in order to find contrast between the prosody of sentences ...

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosylla...

The aim of this research is to study effects of global and local structure of texts and of rhetorical relations between sentences on the prosodic realization of sentences in read aloud text. Twenty texts were analysed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text se...

Previously post-focus compression (PFC) - the lowering of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of post-focal words to below those of the same words in identical sentences with neutral focus - was found in Beijing Mandarin but not in Taiwan Southern Min and Taiwan Mandarin. This study investigated whether the presence of PFC would vary with age and language use of societal bilinguals of Sout...

language users benefit from special phonetic tools in order to communicate linguistic information as well as different emotional aspects and paralinguistic information through daily conversation. having functions in conveying semantic information to listeners, prosodic features form the essential part of linguistic behavour, manipulating  them potentially can play an important role in transmitt...