Statistical analysis of a manually annotated, 45-minute subset of the SWITCHBOARD corpus indicates that pronunciation variation observed in spontaneous American English discourse is highly structured at the level of the syllable, particularly when prosodic stress accent (i.e., syllable prominence) is taken into account. The pattern of segmental substitutions and deletions observed are largely a...

Children’s knowledge of nursery rhymes predicts later phonological and reading skills (Maclean et al,1999). This developmental relationship may be mediated by rhythmic and prosodic structure: nursery rhymes have been described as perfect metrical poems. Here we investigate the hypothesis that nursery rhymes are rhythmically fractal. 27 nursery rhymes were spoken in a rhythmic or non-rhythmic (’...

This paper focuses on aspects of tone in Singlish, the (mesolectal/basilectal) variety of English spoken in Singapore, which take up the claim of tone being a marked feature in contact varieties. While the source of tonal properties may well be the dominant Sinitic substrates, the actual patterning, at both word and phrase level, would appear to actually be a consequence of prosodic patterns fo...

We use wavelet-type discrete transforms for signal analysis on strings of finite length. We apply these transforms for edge and hidden Markov process detection. We also present new approaches for string matching and for measures of the diversity of chaotic strings.

language users benefit from special phonetic tools in order to communicate linguistic information as well as different emotional aspects and paralinguistic information through daily conversation. having functions in conveying semantic information to listeners, prosodic features form the essential part of linguistic behavour, manipulating  them potentially can play an important role in transmitt...

Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary at three levels of prosodic structur...

Prosodic structure encodes the grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech in American English through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their in...