One of the key requirements in understanding a text is deciding how successive utterances relate to one another. Anaphors help in this respect by picking out entities already existing in the discourse and indicating the referent to which the new information encoded in the utterance should be attached. Sometimes, the interpretation of an anaphor is determined entirely by the morphosyntactic feat...

Mungbam [mij] is an endangered and underdocumented Bantoid (Yemne-Kimbi) language of the Northwest province of Cameroon with approximatly 2000 speakers divided between five dialects (Munken, Ngun, Biya, Abar and Missong) (Good et al., in press). The goal of this presentation is to draw attention to prominence asymmetries in Mungbam words which indicate that the first syllable of noun and verb s...

This paper reports results of an acoustic study of stress and length patterns in Ingrian, a Finnic language closely related to Finnish. Primary stressed syllables were found to have higher fundamental frequency than both secondary stressed and unstressed syllables. Intensity and duration played a limited role in signaling stress. In keeping with published descriptions, consonants preceding a lo...

This study aims at automatically classifying levels of acoustic prominence on a dataset of 200 Swedish sentences of read speech by one male native speaker. Each word in the sentences was categorized by four speech experts into one of three groups depending on the level of prominence perceived. Six acoustic features at a syllable level and seven features at a word level were used. Two machine le...

This paper presents work in progress on the automatic detection of prosodic prominence in continuous speech. Prosodic prominence involves two different phonetic features: pitch accents, connected with fundamental frequency (F0) movements and syllable overall energy, and stress, which exhibits a strong correlation with syllable nuclei duration and high-frequency emphasis. By measuring these acou...