A simple restatement of the developmental stress hypothesis is that certain attributes of bird song are honest indicators of sig-naler quality because of their developmental costs. Spencer and

This paper shows some acoustic parameters in time and frequency domains obtained by digital processing of infant cry data and others. The data consists in several pre-speech and speech signal of 6 children affected by Epilepsy in the Neurology Service of the Southern Children Hospital. Several ages and both sexes are considered. The samples were taken in both ways, using spontaneous form and sy...

Languages frequently express focus by enhancing various acoustic attributes of an utterance, but it is widely accepted that the main enhancement appears on stressed syllables. In languages without lexical stress, the question arises as to how focus is acoustically manifested. We thus examine the acoustic properties associated with prominence in three stressless languages, Indonesian, Korean and...

This paper offers a contribution towards the prosodic interpretation of segmental sequences. Focus will be given to consonantal sequences where epenthesis may optionally occur in Brazilian Portuguese, as in o[bs]truir or o[bis]truir “to obstruct”. We will show that some consonantal sequences have distinct representations from others, being that the difference in representation has an impact on ...

This study examines the phonetic characteristics of primary versus secondary stress on the first syllables of the surname ‘Wheateron’ and related adjective ‘Wheateresque’ in postnuclear, deaccented position in a dialogue produced 40 times by 3 Australian English talkers. Synchronised acoustic, electromagnetometer, and electropalatographic recordings were analysed. One subject had a higher F0 in...

This study of lexical stress in English is part of a series of studies, the goal of which is to describe the acoustics of lexical stress for a number of typologically different languages. When fully developed the methodology should be applicable to any language. The database of recordings so far includes Brazilian Portuguese, English (U.K.), Estonian, German, French, Italian and Swedish. The ac...

Phonetic detail of voiced and unvoiced fricatives was examined using speech analysis tools. Outputs of eight f0 trackers were combined to give reliable voicing and f0 values. Log energy andMel frequency cepstral features were used to train a Gaussian classifier that objectively labeled speech frames for frication. Duration statistics were derived from the voicing and frication labels for distin...

This study examined the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Indian English. Together with the patterns of lexical stress placement, the parameters of syllable duration, pitch slope, intensity and spectral balance were examined in six noun-verb pairs. Two L1 backgrounds (Hindi and Malayalam) were examined. Results showed that lexical stress placement varied substantially acros...