Prosodic Prominence and prosodic boundaries have been shown to effect syllabic durations. However another factor, redundancy, also appears to have a major impact. More common words and words you can easily predict from context (more redundant) tend to be articulated less clearly and so also have a tendency to have shortened syllabic durations. This paper explores the relationship between measur...

The Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPMs) based lithographic techniques have been demonstrated as an extremely capable patterning tool. Manipulating surfaces, creating atomic assembly, fabricating chemical patterns, imaging topography and characterizing various mechanical properties of materials in nanometer regime are enabled by this technique. In this paper, a qualified overview of diverse lithog...

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Forschungsvorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministers f ur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie unter dem F orderkennzeichen 01 IV 701 K/5 gef ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei den Autoren. ABSTRACT Parsing can be improved in automatic speech understanding if prosodic boundary marking is taken into account, becau...

In this paper it is shown that at the edges of prosodic domains, initial consonant and final vowels have more extreme (less reduced) lingual articulations, which are called articulatory strengthening. Linguopalatal contact for consonants and vowels in different prosodic positions was compared, using reiterant-speech versions of sentences with a variety of phrasings read by three speakers of Ame...

Parsing can be improved in automatic speech understanding if prosodic boundary marking is taken into account, because syntactic boundaries are often marked by prosodic means. Because large databases are needed for the training of statistical models for prosodic boundaries, we developed a labeling scheme for syntactic{prosodic boundaries within the German Verbmobil project (automatic speech{to{s...

In this paper, the prosodic information, a very special and important feature in Mandarin speech, is used for Mandarin telephone speech utterance verification. A two-stage strategy, with recognition followed by verification, is adopted. For keyword recognition, 59 context-independent subsyllables, i.e., 22 INITIAL’s and 37 FINAL’s in Mandarin speech, and one background/silence model, are used a...

In the area of large French speech corpora, there is a demonstrated need for a common prosodic notation system allowing for easy data exchange, comparison, and automatic annotation. The major questions are: (1) how to develop a single simple scheme of prosodic transcription which could form the basis of guidelines for non-expert manual annotation (NEMA), used for linguistic teaching and researc...

This paper introduces a prosodic phrasing method in Korean to improve the naturalness of speech synthesis, especially in textto-speech conversion. In prosodic phrasing, it is necessary to understand the structure of a sentence through a language processing procedure, such as POS tagging and parsing, since syntactic structure correlates better with the prosodic structure of speech than with othe...

This article presents a model of prosodic structure development that takes account of the fundamental continuity between child and adult systems, the surface level divergence of child forms from their adult target forms, and the overall developmental paths of prosodic structure. The main empirical base for the study comes from longitudinal data collected from three Japanese-speaking children (1...

Within spontaneous speech there are wide variations in the articulation of the same word by the same speaker. Some words become extremely reduced while others seem to stand out more strongly in a phrase or sentence. This thesis explores these variations in articulation from two different but, arguably, related perspectives, prosodic structure and redundancy. I argue that the constraint of produ...