The study of realization of French uvular /ʁ/ is usually considered as problematic due to its variability. In this study, an articulatory (EMA) and aerodynamic experiment allowed us to determine its major axes of variation. We show that the degree of constriction between the tongue and the palate is related to the voicing of the consonant and we validate the use of a harmonic-to-noise ratio for...

F0 values of filled pauses (FP) in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese were analyzed to examine the mechanism by which the F0 heights of FP were determined. Statistical analyses of the F0 values of FP occurring in between two full-fledged accentual phrases (AP) revealed correspondence between the occurrence timing of FP and the F0 height. Based upon this finding, 5 models of F0 prediction were p...

This study aims to evaluate the importance of phonation cues in the acoustic realization of four vocal emotions (happiness, fear, anger, and sadness) in Mandarin Chinese. Our perception experiment confirmed that native listeners could differentiate these emotions. To explain how listeners accomplished the task in the perception experiment, we investigated the acoustic cues used by speakers. An ...

We present a series of studies of affirmative cue words—a family of cue words such as “okay” or “alright" that speakers use frequently in conversation. These words pose a challenge for spoken dialogue systems because of their ambiguity: They may be used for agreeing with what the interlocutor has said, indicating continued attention, or for cueing the start of a new topic, among other meanings....

--------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT----------------------------------------------------------This study explores the pitch realization of utterances in spontaneous Chinese speech, and it is found that there is a great variation of the pitch ranges of intonation phrases. Most of them are about half of the speaker’s maximum pitch range, and the pitch register is usual...

This paper reports a difference in English between the prosodic properties of contrastive FOCUS and presentational focus entities when they are immediately followed within the sentence by a presentational focus. In this context, the contrastive FOCUS shows not only a L+H* pitch accent, but also a following phonological phrase break, marked by both a Lphrase accent and temporal disjuncture. In t...

Northern Bizkaian Basque shares important prosodic features with Tokyo Japanese, including the existence of a lexical distinction between accented and unaccented content words, the presence of phrase-initial rises and the consistent realization of accents as tonal falls. In this paper we investigate whether NB Basque is also like Japanese in not making use of syllable duration as a correlate of...

This production study investigates the interaction of prosody, word order and information structure with respect to whconstituents in Urdu. We contrasted immediately preverbal wh-constituents with immediately postverbal ones. The preverbal position is the default focus position in Urdu; the appearance of wh-constituents in the immediately postverbal position within the verbal complex is not wel...

The prosodic realization of focus and its perception in Tibetan (Anduo dialect) were experimentally investigated. Using the question-and-answer paradigm, the speakers were asked to read aloud two target sentences in different focus conditions. Systematic acoustic analysis and statistical tests showed that, [1] On-focus F0 was raised sharply in medial and final focus conditions, but not much in ...

As the basic prosodic unit, the prosodic word influences the naturalness and the intelligibility greatly. Although the research shows that the lexicon word are greatly different from the prosodic word, the lexicon word still provides the important cues for the prosodic word forming. The rhythm constraint is another important factor for the prosodic word prediction. Some lexicon word length patt...