Musical rhythms encompass temporal patterns that often yield regular metrical accents (e.g., a beat). There have been mixed results regarding perception as a function of metrical saliency, namely, whether sensitivity to a deviant was greater in metrically stronger or weaker positions. Besides, effects of metrical position have not been examined in non-isochronous rhythms, or with respect to mul...

Since Bolinger’s [1] discovery that pitch cues accentual prominence in English, a tension has arisen between two strategies: equating accent with pitch excursions and relying on perception for identifying accented words. This paper investigates the relation between prominence judgments from untrained listeners and accentual labels produced by trained transcribers. Naïve speakers of English, Spa...

It has already been observed that there is no one-to-one mapping between intonational categories and the pragmatic functions they are used to express. For instance, in German a particular pitch accent (L+H*) is often used to express contrastive (corrective) focus, but neither is the use of this pitch accent confined to this function nor is this the only pitch accent used to express it. In parti...

We measured the alignment of f0 landmarks with segmental landmarks in nuclear “pointed hat” accents in controlled speech materials in Dutch. We varied the phonological length of the stressed vowel and the “right context” (syllable membership of following consonant, presence or absence of stress clash). The nuclear accented word was always followed by an unaccented content word. Based on previou...

This paper reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch NPs. Accent-patterns were obtained in a (semi-)spontaneous way via a simple dialogue-game with 8 Dutch speakers and 4 Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, a...

This study investigates the relationship between emotional states and prosody. A prosody detection algorithm was applied to emotional speech to extract accents and intonational boundaries automatically and these were compared with hand-labeled prosodic units. The measurements used in the detection algorithm are derived from duration, pitch, harmonic structure, spectral tilt, and amplitude. The ...

A number of different cues allow listeners to perceive musical meter. Three experiments examined effects of melodic and temporal accents on perceived meter in excerpts from folk songs scored in 6/8 or 3/4 meter. Participants matched excerpts with 1 of 2 metrical drum accompaniments. Melodic accents included contour change, melodic leaps, registral extreme, melodic repetition, and harmonic rhyth...

This paper presents the stylization of intonation contours and clustering of F0 movements on accented and post-accented syllables based on annotated speech corpora. Special software – PitchLine – has been developed to enable the flexible quasiautomatic segmentation and parametrization of intonation curves. The experimental material obtained from a 15 min passage read by a male speaker included ...