It is well-known that focus may have a prosodic reflection in various languages, affecting prosodic phrasing, prominence and/or intonation. However, the issue whether there is any relationship among the different kinds of prosodic marking remains unclear. This paper presents a detailed examination of the prosody of focus in European Portuguese. It is shown that there are no phrasing effects of ...

Reports in the sentence processing literature on whether untrained speakers reliably disambiguate syntactic phrase structure ambiguities with prosody have shown mixed results. Allbritton et al (1996), Straub (1997), and Snedeker et al (1999) found little to no evidence of prosodic disambiguation of syntax when other factors resolved the ambiguity, and argued that prosodic disambiguation is prod...

We present a study on the relation between fundamental frequency (F0) and its perceptual effect in the context of text-tospeech (TTS) synthesis. Features that essentially capture the intonational (macro-prosodic) properties of spoken speech are introduced and analysed with regard to the following questions: (i) How does the prosodic variation of TTS signals differ from natural speech? (ii) Is t...

This paper investigates prosodic exceptions to rightmost stress in English nested foci. We concentrate on sentences involving discourse-novel material, where the absence of rightmost stress cannot follow from the discourse-given status of the relevant rightmost constituent. We show that these cases cannot be accounted for by an analysis directly linking pitch accents to focus projections via F-...

Focussing on the prosodic labelling of Japanese as an example, this paper describes the application of speech synthesis technology in a variety of speech processing tasks. It discusses rst the use of synthesised utterances in the forced alignment and segmentation of a speech corpus, then the use of generated prosodic contours to determine the prosodic phrasing of an utterance, and nally the com...

This paper introduces an unsupervised prosody labeling method for preparing a large speech corpus used in developing a Mandarin Text-to-Speech system. Adopting a four-layer prosody hierarchy, the proposed method performs an unsupervised segmental clustering that iteratively segments spoken utterances into strings of prosodic constituents and models the patterns of the segmented prosodic constit...

Prosodic trees as a hierarchical representation of prosodic organization in French proved to be efficient for automatic processing of continuous speech. We applied this technique to the prosodic boundary detection on the output of a speech recognition application in order to test whether prosodic boundaries of different levels in tree confirm or not recognition hypotheses. Two types of tree con...

Continuous speech input for ASR processing is usually presegmented into speech stretches by pauses. In this paper, we propose that smaller, prosodically defined units can be identified by tackling the problem on imbalanced prosodic unit boundary detection using five machine learning techniques. A parsimonious set of linguistically motivated prosodic features has been proven to be useful to char...

This paper investigates the prosodic patterns of non-lexical response tokens in a Swedish call-in radio show. The feedback of a professional speaker was investigated to give insight in how to build a simulated active listener that could encourage its users to continue talking. Possible domains for such systems include customer care and second language learning. The prosodic analysis of the non-...