In automatic speech understanding, division of continuous running speech into syntactic chunks is a great problem. Syntactic boundaries are often marked by prosodic means. For the training of statistical models for prosodic boundaries large databases are necessary. For the German Verbmobil (VM) project (automatic speech-to-speech translation), we developed a syntactic±prosodic labelling scheme ...

Prosodic structure has been assumed to serve as a frame for articulation, so that phonetic shaping of abstract phonological representations is fine-tuned as a function of the prosodic system of the language. The intricate relationship between phonetics and prosodic structure has been explored in the literature under the rubric of the phonetics-prosody interface. This paper reviews various aspec...

In this paper we examine prosodic and syntactic structures of spontaneous English speech. By wavelet-based analysis, the prosodic structure of speech can be visually represented as a tree diagram. Combined with automatic syntactic parsing, this enables a novel method to compare prosodic and syntactic hierarchical structures in spoken language. In our research we segmented a sample of spontaneou...

BACKGROUND Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a specific triad of symptoms such as abnormalities in social interaction, abnormalities in communication and restricted activities and interests. While verbal autistic subjects may present a correct mastery of the formal aspects of speech, they have difficulties in prosody (music of speech), leading to communication disorders. ...

Prosody serves an important function in speech communication: prosodic phrasing groups words into pragmatically and semantically coherent smaller chunks and prosodic prominence encodes the discourse-level status and rhythmic structure of a word within a phrase. Acoustic cues to prosody are available from the speech signal and can be used by listeners to recover the pragmatic and discourse meani...

This paper describes a preliminary work on prosody modeling aspect of a spoken language understanding system for Thai. Specifically, the model is designed to integrate prosodics into a language model based on constraint dependency grammar. There are two steps involved, namely the prosodic annotation process and the prosodic disambiguation process. The annotation process uses prosodic informatio...

Yoon, Tae-Jin. 2014. Speaker variation in English prosodic boundary. Linguistic Research 31(1), 1-23. This paper analyses the rate of inter-speaker consistency in the way multiple speakers render prosodic events when they read the same scripts. Prosodically labeled data of five speakers from the Boston Radio Speech Corpus (BURSC) are used to measure the degree of speaker variation in rendering ...

Acoustic data are presented from a prosodic database containing data from 3 French speakers. The prosodic boundaries examined are the Utterance, the Intonational Phrase, the Accentual Phrase, and the Word. The aim is to study the interaction of coarticulatory effects with prosodic effects. The vowel /a/ before the prosodic boundary and the consonants /b d I f s 5/ after the prosodic boundary ar...

This paper aims to explore some acoustic properties (i.e. duration and pitch amplitude of speech) associated with three different emotions: anger, sadness and joy against neutrality as a reference point, all being intentionally expressed by six Persian speakers. The primary purpose of this study is to find out if there is any correspondence between the given emotions and prosody patterning in P...

Native speakers and learners of Latvian read isolated words and a short text, designed to inventory the prosodic patterns of the target language. The learners did not match native speaker patterns on any of the prosodic properties examined: contrastive vowel durations, syllable intonations, stress or rhythm. Rather, their productions were strongly influenced by the prosodic patterns of their na...