Perceptual correlates of Turkish word stress and their contribution to lexical access were studied using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component in event-related potentials (ERPs). The MMN was expected to indicate if segmentally identical Turkish words were distinguished on the sole basis of prosodic features such as fundamental frequency (f 0), spectral emphasis (SE), and duration. The salienc...

This paper describes a study of speaking-style characteristics, or “tone-of-voice”, in conversational speech, and shows that non-verbal information is transmitted efficiently regardless of cultural and linguistic contexts through differences in prosodic and voice-quality features. We asked Korean and American listeners with no previous kowledge of Japanese to judge the meaning of various uttera...

The relationship between prosodic structure and syntactic structure has remained a controversial and unresolved area, partly due to the lack of rich corpora of natural speech, and partly due to the complexity involved in both syntax and prosody. Chom-sky & Halle (1968, p. 372) state that " although there is a substantial literature on intonational and prosodic features in English, it is largely...

Prosodic features of the speech signal include fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and duration. In order to study the development of prosody independent from segmental aspects of speech, we considered the question–statement contrast. In English, adults mark the contrast using changes in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity, with F0 being the most prominent cue. Declarative questions...

This paper proposes a novel technique for speech-based interest recognition in natural conversations. We introduce a fully automatic system that exploits the principle of bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) as well as the structure of socalled bottleneck networks. BLSTM nets are able to model a self-learned amount of context information, which was shown to be beneficial for affect reco...

The Utsunomiya University (UU) Spoken Dialogue Database for Paralinguistic Information Studies is introduced. The UU Database is especially intended for use in understanding the usage, structure and effect of paralinguistic information in expressive Japanese conversational speech. Paralinguistic information refers to meaningful information, such as emotion or attitude, delivered along with ling...

The goal of the project is to model the prosodic structuring of speech in terms of boundaries and groupings. The modeling will include different communicative situations and be based on existing as well as new speech corpora. Production and perception studies will be used in parallel with automatic methods developed for analysis, modeling and prediction of prosody. The model will be perceptuall...

Sincerity is important in everyday human communication and perception of genuineness can greatly affect emotions and outcomes in social interactions. In this paper, submitted for the INTERSPEECH 2016 Sincerity Challenge, we examine a corpus of six different types of apologetic utterances from a variety of English speakers articulated in different prosodic styles, and we rate the sincerity of ea...

Recently the studies concentrating on computer assistant language learning (CALL) has been growing in numbers as they offer many advantages that couldn't otherwise be provided by a traditional classroom setting. In addition to popular computer-assisted pronunciation teaching (CAPT) systems, computer-assisted prosody training system is another branch of CALL (Computer assistant language learning...

this study examines the ideological content of six internationally-used elt textbooks, three british and three american. applying the theory and procedures of critical discourse analysis (cda), three aspects of the conversations in the textbooks, i.e. content, relations, and positions were examined. results suggest that in terms of content, british textbooks tend to entertain the students while...