Starting from spontaneous speech data of the Kiel Corpus, reduction patterns of function words are described, which also incorporate more global articulator-y prosodies, such as nasality, labiality and glottalization. The results of 4 perceptual experiments support the hypothesis that these long components of speech production are mapped onto perception. The discussion is also a contribution to...

Speech synthesis systems still fail in producing acceptable prosodies. We are developing a research strategy designed to de-focus attention on the objective acoustic accuracy of synthetic speech in favour of enhancing the speech to optimize a listener’s ability to repair ‘damaged’ signals. To do this we need to know more about how listeners repair errors and how we might trigger the repair proc...

This study investigates whether the learning of prosodic cues to word boundaries in speech segmentation is more difficult if the native and second/foreign languages (L1 and L2) have similar (though non-identical) prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis). It does so by comparing French, Korean, and English listeners' use of fundamental-...

This study investigates whether learning to use prosodic cues to word boundaries in second-language speech segmentation is easier or more difficult if the native and second languages have similar (though non-identical) prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies. It compares French, Korean, and English listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency rise and lengthening as cues to word-fin...

This paper analyzes the occurrence of phonetic interruption cues at points of syntactic irregularities (false starts and truncations) in a large annotated corpus of German dialogues and compares interruption glottalization with laryngealization in terminal low phrase-final prosodies. Glottalization (including glottal stop) predominantly marks word fragments, whereas non-verbal insertions, e.g. ...