This paper examines how non-expert listeners perceive prominence and prosodic boundaries in Korean using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) method, developed by Mo, Cole and Lee [9] for American English. While prominence is used to mark prosodically salient or “highlighted” words and phrases, prosodic boundaries demarcate units or “chunks” of speech to mirror the hierarchical relations among...

In three experiments, a referential communication task was used to determine the conditions under which speakers produce and listeners use prosodic cues to distinguish alternative meanings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase. Analyses of the actions and utterances from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that Speakers chose to produce effective prosodic cues to disambiguation only when the referentia...

This paper investigates the usefulness of sentence-internal prosodic cues in syntactic parsing of transcribed speech. Intuitively, prosodic cues would seem to provide much the same information in speech as punctuation does in text, so we tried to incorporate them into our parser in much the same way as punctuation is. We compared the accuracy of a statistical parser on the LDC Switchboard treeb...

The goal of this project is to investigate the use of different levels of prosodic information in speech recognition and understanding. In particular, the current focus of the work is the use of prosodic phrase boundary information in parsing. The research involves determining a representation of prosodic information suitable for use in a speech understanding system, developing reliable algorit...

Prosodic structure is often perceived as exhibiting regularities in the patterning of tone sequences or stressed syllables. Recently, prosodic regularities in the distal (non-local) context have been shown to influence the perceived prosodic constituency of syllables. Three experiments tested the nature of distal prosodic patterns influencing perceptions of prosodic structure, using eight-sylla...

Drawing on insights from recent work on phonetic adaptation, we examined how listeners interpret prosodic cues to two opposing pragmatic meanings of the phrase “It looks like an X” (e.g., “It looks like a zebra (and it is one)” and “It LOOKS like a zebra (but its actually not)”. After establishing that different prosodic contours map onto these meanings (Experiment 1), we demonstrated that pros...

Non-lexical prosodic analysis is our term for the process of extracting prosodic structure from a speech waveform without reference to the lexical contents of the speech. It has been shown that human subjects are able to perceive prosodic structure within speech without lexical cues. There is some evidence that this extends to the perception of disfluency, for example, the detection interruptio...

In this study we propose a method of prosodic boundary detection based only on acoustic cues which are easily extractable from the speech signal and without any supervision. Drawing a parallel between the process of language acquisition in babies and the speech processing techniques for under-resourced languages, we take advantage of the findings of several psycholinguistic studies relative to ...