The present study addresses the question of whether the grammatical configuration of prosodic units (i.e., their alignment with the clause unit) may contribute to systematic prosodic patterns. Specifically, we focus on the pitch variation on prosodic boundaries in conversational Mandarin. Results demonstrate that the grammatical configuration of the prosodic phrasing correlates with systematic ...

The people of Sunkesula village are not happy. 500 families in the tiny village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh gave up 860 acres of their land to the Forest Department for the expansion of the Great Indian Bustard Wildlife Sanctuary (famous for the endangered blackbuck). The reservoir that was their source of stored-water now lies within the sanctuary. Access to it is denied. No...

AbstractThe importance of spatial clusters, or "hotspots," in infectious disease epidemiology has been increasingly recognized, and targeting hotspots is often seen as an important component of disease-control strategies. However, the precise meaning of "hotspot" varies widely in current research and policy documents. Hotspots have been variously described as areas of elevated incidence or prev...

We have used names, particularly surnames, to identify people who are related. However, this has been done in various ways in different societies. While in many western countries we use a given (first) name and a surname (family name) to identify a person, in Arab countries, there are in fact no surnames; people use their given name followed by their father’s given name. For example, while my n...

I DON’T THINK anything in our industry would get done without deadlines. We have that block of code to write by next month, a presentation to complete for a staff meeting next Friday, and that paper to write by the ITC due date. “Schedules are for slipping,” said a manager in Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, but a slip just means a new deadline. I had a manager who required a date for each...

Prosodic boundary prediction is the key to improving the intelligibility and naturalness of synthetic speech for a TTS system. This paper investigated the problem of automatic segmentation of prosodic word and prosodic phrase, which are two fundamental layers in the hierarchical prosodic structure of Mandarin Chinese. Maximum Entropy (ME) Model was used at the front end for both prosodic word a...

Prosodic boundary prediction is the key to improving the intelligibility and naturalness of synthetic speech for a TTS system. This paper investigated the problem of automatic segmentation of prosodic word and prosodic phrase, which are two fundamental layers in the hierarchical prosodic structure of Mandarin Chinese. Maximum Entropy (ME) Model was used at the front end for both prosodic word a...

Automatic speech processing has recently turned to the treatment of continuous spontaneous speech, which demands, among many other issues, a representation of its prosodic organization. This paper presents a new approach to automatic prosodic boundary detection and prosodic unit structuring, based, with certain changes, on a descriptive theory of the French prosodic system initially proposed fo...