This paper adresses two questions. The first question is if perception of emotional prosody changes when visual stimuli are present. It has already been shown by others that the perception of vowels and consonants is augmented or changed when visual information is present.The question is then if perception of such categories as emotions, mainly expressed by prosody, are also affected by multimo...

The meaning of a speech stream is communicated by more than the particular words used by the speaker. For example, speech melody, referred to as prosody, also contributes to meaning. In a cross-modal priming study we investigated the influence of emotional prosody on the processing of visually presented positive and negative target words. The results indicate that emotional prosody modulates wo...

This paper describes a set of experiments using French reiterant speech (on a canonical [ma] syllable). Experiments are designed to perform a diagnostic evaluation of the linguistic performances of synthetic prosody. Different experimental procedures are organised to match either synthetic or natural utterance, in their reiterant or lexicalised versions. The natural procedures are used as a ref...

While various aspects of syntactic structure have been shown to bear on the determination of phraselevel prosody, the text-to-speech field has lacked a robust working system to test the possible relations between syntax and prosody. We describe an implemented system which uses the deterministic parser Fidditch to create the input for a set of prosody rules. The prosody rules generate a prosody ...

The vocal expression of humans includes expressions of emotions, such as anger or happiness, and pragmatic intonations, such as interrogative or affirmative, embedded within the language. These two types of prosody are differently affected by the so-called push and pull effects. Push effects, influenced by psychophysiological activities, strongly affect emotional prosody, whereas pull effects, ...

This paper proposes to model broadcast news prosody using conditional random fields (CRF) for news story segmentation. Broadcast news has both editorial prosody and speech prosody that convey essential structural information for story segmentation. Hence we extract prosodic features, including pause duration, pitch, intensity, rapidity, speaker change and music, for a sequence of boundary candi...

We use an auditory-visual semantic priming paradigm to investigate the effect of phonetically-cued emotional information (emotional prosody) on semantic activation of a lexical carrier. In two experiments, we show that words uttered in emotional prosody, although infrequent and atypical, do not necessarily hinder lexical access nor hamper subsequent semantic spreading, and that effects of emoti...

Two experiments investigated the effects of prosody and visual context on syntactic ambiguity resolution. The results from the first experiment showed increased processing difficulty when prosodic structure conflicted with syntactic structure, consistent with previous reports. In the second, both prosody and visual context were manipulated. The results showed that conflicting visual context can...

We investigate the role of prosody in child-directed speech of three English speaking adults using data collected for the Human Speechome Project, an ecologically valid, longitudinal corpus collected from the home of a family with a young child. We looked at differences in prosody between child-directed and adult-directed speech. We also looked at the change in prosody of child-directed speech ...

Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, s...