This paper investigates the need for applying English prosody when synthesising English portions of mixed English/German texts using a German-based polyglot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system. The polyglot system is based on a monolingual German TTS system, which uses a phone mapping from English to German to synthesise English texts. Two systems with varying degrees of assimilation to Engli...

This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on ...

The present studies explored the role of prosody in motivating others, and applied selfdetermination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) to do so. Initial studies describe patterns of prosody that discriminate motivational speech. Autonomy support was expressed with lower intensity, slower speech rate and less voice energy in both motivationally laden and neutral (but motivationally primed) sentences. I...

Prosody structure prediction plays an important role in text-tospeech (TTS) conversion systems. It is the must and prior step to parametric prosody prediction. Dynamic programming (DP) and decision tree (DT) are widely used for prosody structure prediction [1][2][3] but with well-known limitations. In this paper, two other new methods, combination of dynamic programming with decision tree and c...

Speakers modulate their prosody to express not only emotional information but also semantic information (e.g., raising pitch for upward motion). Moreover, this information can help listeners infer meaning. Work investigating the communicative role of prosodically conveyed meaning has focused on reference resolution, and potential mnemonic benefits remain unexplored. We investigated the effect o...

PURPOSE To investigate the perception and production of lexical stress and processing of affective prosody in adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA). We hypothesized preserved processing of lexical and affective prosody but atypical lexical prosody production. METHOD Sixteen children with HFA and 15 typically developing (TD) peers participated in 3 experiments that examined the follow...

Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder, has been taken as evidence that music and language constitute separate modules. This research focused on the linguistic component of prosody and aimed to assess whether relationships exist between the pitch processing mechanisms for music and prosody in WS. Children with WS and typically developing individuals were presented with a ...

Schizophrenics, manics, depressives and normal subjects (15 in each group) were tested for their ability to understand and express the prosodic quality of speech. Sentences in which one word was stressed (stress prosody comprehension) or in which a particular emotion was conveyed (emotional prosody comprehension) were taped and played to subjects to test their comprehension. Subjects were then ...

Earlier works show that using a prosody specification that is derived from natural human spoken rendition, increases the naturalness and overall acceptance of speech synthesised complex visual structures by conveying to audio certain semantic information hidden in the visual structure. However, prosody alone, although exhibits significant improvement, cannot perform adequately in the cases of v...

The present studies explored the role of prosody in motivating others, and applied self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) to do so. Initial studies describe patterns of prosody that discriminate motivational speech. Autonomy support was expressed with lower intensity, slower speech rate and less voice energy in both motivationally laden and neutral (but motivationally primed) sentences. ...