In English, the focus of a sentence is an important factor in determining the prosody of an utterance. Some linguistic analyses of focus [9][10][11] claim that (1) prosodic representation of focus is determined by pitch accents, (2) the distribution of pitch accents is determined by the size of the focus constituent, and (3) one pro-sodic realization may be ambiguous for several focus constitue...

The southeastern United States has experienced rapid growth in the Hispanic population recent decades, giving rise to a newly forming bilingual community. present study builds on previous work by authors via expansion of “variable swarm”: analysis multiple linguistic variables simultaneously for same set speakers, with goal understanding patterns accommodation and change within initial included...

The present study investigates the prosodic differences of English mild imperative sentences between native American English speakers and Chinese EFL (learning English as foreign language) learners within the framework of AM Theory. The study found out that prosodic native speakers and Chinese EFL learners exhibit the following prosodic differences: (i) phonological patterns of sentence-stress ...

Prosodic structure has large effects on the temporal realization of speech via the shaping of articulatory events. It is important for speech scientists to be able to systematically quantify these prosodic effects on articulation in a way that is capable both of differentiating between the degree of prosodic lengthening associated with varying linguistic contexts and that is generalizable acros...

The Laboratory Phonology research paradigm has established that abstract phonological structure has direct reflections in the spatiotemporal details of speech production. Past exploration of the complex relationship between linguistic structural properties and articulation has resulted in a softening of a severance between phonetics and phonology, which in recent years has begun to likewise enc...

This study compares the realization of English narrow focus by L1 speakers of English and Taiwan Mandarin. Results show that L1 Taiwan Mandarin speakers produce a much smaller increase in average F0 and amplitude for on-focus words and a much smaller decrease in average F0 and amplitude on post-focus words than L1 English speakers do. Moreover, post-focus compression of F0 range and duration, v...

In this paper, the prosodic realization of focus in six languages/dialects in China were experimentally investigated, which were Yi and Tibetan (TibetanBurma), Wa and Deang (Mon-Khmer), Uygur (Turkic) and Nanchang dialect (Gan), all spoken in China. Tibetan, Uygur and Nanchang showed onfocus F0 raising and post-focus F0 compression (PFC) whereas no clear F0 variation due to focus was found in W...

An analysis is presented on the rate of inter-speaker consistency in the way multiple speakers realize prosodic events when they read the same scripts. The analysis is made on the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus (BURSC). The BURSC consists of data from five speakers (3 female and 2 male), each reading the same scripts that comprise more than 110 different sentences. The design of the corp...

This paper investigates the prosodic realization of information structure categories in Standard Chinese. A number of proper names with different tonal combinations were elicited as a grammatical subject in five pragmatic contexts. Results show that both duration and F0 range of the tonal realizations were adjusted to signal the information structure categories (i.e. theme vs. rheme and backgro...