This study uses connectionist modeling to explore whether and how infants might learn prosodic focus directly from continuous speech input. Focus is a communicative function that serves to put emphasis on a particular part of an utterance, and it is mainly encoded by pitch variations. The acquisition of focus entails two major difficulties. The first is that focus-related pitch patterns are con...

Music and speech are often cited as characteristically human forms of communication. Both share the features of hierarchical structure, complex sound systems, and sensorimotor sequencing demands, and both are used to convey and influence emotions, among other functions [1]. Both music and speech also prominently use acoustical frequency modulations, perceived as variations in pitch, as part of ...

Because of fluctuation in leg tension, pitch motion is very effective fatigue and life safety of leg elements in tension leg structures (TLSs). In this paper an exact solution for pitch vibration of a TLS interacting with ocean wave is presented. The legs of TLP are considered as elastic springs. The flow is assumed to be irrotational and single-valued velocity potentials are defined. The effec...

Brief complex tone bursts with fundamental frequencies (F0s) of 100, 125, 166.7, and 250 Hz were bandpass filtered between the 22nd and 30th harmonics, to produce waveforms with five regularly occurring envelope peaks ("pitch pulses") that evoked pitches associated with their repetition period. Two such tone bursts were presented sequentially and separated by a silent interval of two periods (2...

This study reports our initial results on whether the use of pitch for expressing emotions differs between Mandarin and English. The production experiment was conducted using five emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) by comparing both prosodic cues and phonation cues between Mandarin and English emotional speech. Results demonstrated that within each language, each vocal emot...

A 2D unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is employed to simulate buoyancy-driven turbulent ventilation in attics with different pitch values and ceiling insulation levels under summer conditions. The impacts of roof pitch and ceiling insulation on the cooling load of gable-roof residential buildings are investigated based on the simulation of turbulent air flow and natural convect...

People intuitively match basic tastes to sounds of different pitches, and the matches that they make tend to be consistent across individuals. It is, though, not altogether clear what governs such crossmodal mappings between taste and auditory pitch. Here, we assess whether variations in taste intensity influence the matching of taste to pitch as well as the role of emotion in mediating such cr...

In this study, a novel approach is proposed for modeling speech parameter variations between neutral and stressed conditions and employed in a technique for stressed speech synthesis and recognition. The proposed method consists of modeling the variations in pitch contour, voiced speech duration, and average spectral structure using hidden Markov models (HMM’s). While HMM’s have traditionally b...

Instrumented treadmills provide a convenient means for applying horizontal perturbations during gait or standing. However, varying the treadmill belt speed introduces inertial artifacts in the sagittal plane moment component of the ground reaction force. Here we present a compensation method based on a second-order dynamic model that predicts inertial pitch moment from belt acceleration. The me...