Conventional dictionaries, albeit they often comprise an impressive amount o f para­ digmatic information on various aspects o f linguistic description, usually pay only little attention to the representation o f syntagmatic information. Admittedly, apart hrom spelling conventions and rules o f inflectional agreement, the co-occurrence o f indivi­ dual lexical items will not normally change the...

This paper proposes a new prosody annotation protocol specific to live sports commentaries. Two levels of annotation are defined with HMM-based speech synthesis in view. Local labels are assigned to all syllables and refer to accentual phenomena. Global labels classify sequences of words into five distinct subgenres, defined in terms of valence and arousal. The objective of the study is to prov...

This paper discusses innovative techniques to automatically estimate a user's emotional state analyzing the speech signal and haptical interaction on a touch-screen or via mouse. The knowledge of a user's emotion permits adaptive strategies striving for a more natural and robust interaction. We classify seven emotional states: surprise, joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and neutral user state...

Previous studies have recently agreed that second occurrence focus is phonetically realized as prosodic prominence. What has been missing in the previous studies, however, is a comparison with neutral-focus, in addition to main focus and pre/postfocus, which is necessary to elucidate a precise phonetic status of second occurrence focus. Using evidence from Japanese, this study shows that second...

Human spoken interactions are embodied and situated. Better understanding of the restrictions and affordances this embodiment and situational awareness has on human speech informs the quest for more natural models of human-machine spoken interactions. Here we examine the articulatory realization of communicative meanings expressed through f0 falling and rising prosodic boundaries in quiet and n...

This paper discusses the effects of tonal clash (or strict adjacency between two accents) on the phonetic realization of H* accents in Catalan. The analysis of the data shows that the adjacency of two rising accents triggers a drastic temporal reorganization of the Fo gestures involved, resulting in anticipation of the first gesture and delay of the second. Specifically, in crowded tonal enviro...

Social affects play an important role in the face-to-face interaction and are implied in the realization of speech acts. The prosody is a main vector of social affects and its crosslanguage variability is a challenge for language description as well as for foreign language teaching. The present paper aims at examining the influences of tones on the perception of 19 prosodic social affects of Ma...

Based on enacted dialogues of 60 native speakers, the present study shows that males and females differ in their prosodic realization of lexically and syntactically marked questions in German. Frequency counts of final rises and falls, as well as measurements of mean F0, speaking rate, and intensity levels suggest that males rather than females are more polite, open, and amenable – i.e. overall...

This study examines the sound profiles of sites of initiation in French and Mandarin recycling repair (also disfluent repetitions). 150 examples of disfluent repetitions were extracted from comparative speech corpora of naturally occurred, face-to-face Mandarin and French interaction. By the approach of interactional prosody plus impressionistic judgments, each instance of recycling repair was ...

Realization of coda /t/ in American English is sensitive to segmental and prosodic context, as well as speaker age. One 20 year old and three 50 year old American women read an extensive word list designed to pinpoint some effects of context. For the older women, preceding low vowels conditioned more glottalization of /t/, presumably because of the greater effort involved in making an oral clos...