We propose novel methods for integrating prosody in syntax using generative models. By adopting a grammar whose constituents have latent annotations, the influence of prosody on syntax can be learned from data. In one method, prosody is utilized to seed the latent annotations of a grammar which is then refined using EM iterations. In an orthogonal approach, we integrate prosody into grammar mor...

human brain has been constructed to be different between male and female from structural and functional points of view. this research aims at the study of the difference between the two genders in perception of affective (emotional) prosody of speech. the present study is cross – sectional, whose subjects include 50 iranians in two gender categories of male and female. the responses of each gro...

One major feature of the prosody of Mandarin Chinese speech flow is prosodic phrase grouping [1, 2, and 3]. Phrasal and sentential intonations are governed by a prosody framework that structurally group phrases into a larger/longer and identifiable unit. An overall prosody pattern of such phrase grouping with prosodic specifications is superimposed on phrase group. In turn, individual phrasal i...

BACKGROUND Neurologists generally consider hemispatial neglect to be the primary cognitive deficit following right hemisphere lesions. However, the right hemisphere has a critical role in many cognitive, communication and social functions; for example, in processing emotional prosody (tone of voice). We tested the hypothesis that impaired recognition of emotional prosody is a more accurate indi...

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...

This research aims to construct a high-quality Japanese TTS (Text-to-Speech) system that has high flexibility in treating prosody. Many TTS systems have implemented a prosody control system but such systems have been fundamentally designed to output speech with a standard pitch and speech rate. In this study, we employ a unit selectionconcatenation method and also introduce an analysis-synthesi...

Title of Document: INFANT PREFERENCES FOR TWO PROPERTIES OF INFANT-DIRECTED SPEECH Judith Segal, Master of Arts, 2010 Directed By: Dr. Rochelle Newman, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences This study examined preferences for prosodic and structural properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) in 20 infants, 11 girls and 9 boys, ages 0;11;3 to 0;13;0 (mean age 0;11;28). It was hypothesized th...

Twenty-five school aged children with normal hearing were tested on their perception of prosody using the receptive prosody subtests of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) and Child Paralanguage subtest of Diagnostic Analysis of Non Verbal Accuracy 2 (DANVA 2). Performance of four children with hearing loss on the two prosody measures was compared with performance...

We investigated the effects of angry prosody, varying focus of attention, and laterality of presentation of angry prosody on peripheral nervous system activity. Participants paid attention to either their left or their right ear while performing a sex discrimination task on dichotically presented pseudo-words. These pseudo-words were characterized by either angry or neutral prosody and presente...

As an effort to make prosody useful in spontaneous speech recognition, we adopt a quasi-continuous prosodic annotation and accordingly design a prosody-dependent acoustic model to improve ASR performances. We propose a variable-parameter Hidden Markov Models, modeling the mean vector as a function of the prosody variable through a polynomial regression model. The prosodically-adapted acoustic m...