This work aims to improve text-to-speech synthesis for Wikipedia by advancing and implementing models of prosodic prominence. We propose a new system architecture with explicit prominence modeling and test the first component of the architecture. We automatically extract a phonetic feature related to prominence from the speech signal in the ARCTIC corpus. We then modify the label files and trai...

We investigate the prominence of English words with stress reversal (e.g. èlevátion 2-1 → élevàtion 1-2). We ask what motivates the occurrence of the “early high” (1-2) pattern outside of stress clash contexts, and consider the hypothesis that it marks prominence non-locally. Experiment 1 tests the effect of prominence pattern on memory. Given its markedness and location at phrasal onset, we hy...

This study investigated the word prominence pattern of Kanakanavu, a critically endangered Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. Previous studies on the phonetic correlates of Piwan and Saisiyat agreed that pitch is the only consistent cue, indicating that Formosan languages are more like pitchaccent languages. However, given that word accents are in a fixed position for those two languages, ...

0. Introduction This study examines the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence as perceived by a large number of native listeners of American English who are naïve to the phonetics and phonology of prosody. In English, as in other stress languages, speech utterances are chunked into smaller prosodic phrases, and within a prosodic phrase some words are assigned phrasal stress, which typicall...

Subjects are preferred antecedents for pronominal reference (Mathews and Chodorow, 1988; Hudson-D’Zmura and Tanenhaus, 1997). Many pronoun resolution algorithms account for this by assuming a hierarchy of syntactic prominence with SUBJECTS > OBJECTS. However, for many verbs in English, syntactic role is conflated with semantic role: That is, syntactic SUBJECTS are often semantic AGENTS and so o...

In this study acoustical as well as lexical/syntactic correlates of prominence are analyzed and discussed. Prominence is defined at the word level and is based on listener judgments. Spoken sentences from many different speakers, taken from the Dutch Polyphone corpus of telephone speech, are analyzed. A selection of useful acoustical input features is chosen for classification of word prominenc...

Recent work has suggested that prominence perception could be driven by the predictability of the acoustic prosodic features of speech. On the other hand, lexical predictability and part of speech information are also known to correlate with prominence. In this paper, we investigate how the bottom-up acoustic and top-down lexical cues contribute to sentence prominence by using both types of fea...

Two experiments explored discourse and communicative factors that contribute to the perceived prominence of a word in an utterance, and how that prominence is realized acoustically. In Experiment 1 two hypotheses were tested: (1) acoustic prominence is a product of the given-new status of a word and (2) acoustic prominence depends on the degree to which a referent is accessible, where greater a...

According to the widely accepted Lexical Category Prominence Rule (LCPR), prominence assignment to triconstituent compounds depends on the branching direction. Left-branching compounds, that is, compounds with a left-hand complex constituent, are held to have highest prominence on the left-most constituent, whereas right-branching compounds have highest prominence on the second of the three con...

This paper describes work directed towards the development of a syllable prominence-based prosody generation functionality for a German unit selection speech synthesis system. A general concept for syllable prominence-based prosody generation in unit selection synthesis is proposed. As a first step towards its implementation, an automated syllable prominence annotation procedure based on acoust...