Tho aim of this introductory s~tion is to set the context for Session 13: Prosody. It will do so by defining some basic terms, by considering the status of current research on prosody, and by outlining the papers in the session and how they contribute to and complement previous work in the area. Prosody, perceptually, can be thought of as the relative temporal groupings of words and the relativ...

We present an extension to the Tacotron speech synthesis architecture that learns a latent embedding space of prosody, derived from a reference acoustic representation containing the desired prosody. We show that conditioning Tacotron on this learned embedding space results in synthesized audio that matches the prosody of the reference signal with fine time detail even when the reference and sy...

This study investigated processing effort by measuring peoples' pupil diameter as they listened to sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. In the first experiment, we manipulated prosody. The results showed that when prosodic structure conflicted with syntactic structure, pupil diameter reliably increased. In the second experiment, we manipulated both prosody and visual context. T...

We are interested in developing an automatic emphasis correction system, which converts any unemphasized word in an utterance into emphasized. Analyzing how prosody changes from unaccented to accented is crucial for the task. While previous works on prosody reconstruction only model the prosody contour itself instead of the increment, we propose a framework to study the prosody increment induce...

Does prosody help word recognition? In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic framework in which word and phoneme are dependent on prosody in a way that improves word recognition. The prosody attribute that we investigate in this study is the lengthening of speech segments in the vicinity of intonational phrase boundaries. Explicit Duration Hidden Markov Model (EDHMM) is implemented to pr...

Much of the recent emphasis on prosody (the melody and rhythm of speech) and its disorders (dysprosody) has been on cognitive-affective functions attributed to cortical areas of the right cerebral hemisphere, with little further behavioral or neuroanatomical specification. This focus is inappropriately narrow both from the perspectives of neuropathogenesis and neurobehavioral phenomenology, and...

Recent research on children’s acquisition of prosody, or the rhythm and melody in language, demonstrates that young children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances to a greater extent than was previously documented. Spoken language, structured by prosodic form, is the primary input on which the mental representations and processes that comprise language use are built. U...

The objective was to determine whether disturbances of aVective prosody constitute part of the symptomatology of schizophrenia. AVective prosody is defined here as a neuropsychological function that encompasses all non-verbal aspects of language that are necessary for recognising and conveying emotions in communication. Twenty six schizophrenic outpatients and twenty four normal controls underw...

For the purpose of building Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that can generate high-quality and wide range speech in prosody, we conducted speech database construction. As a speech synthesizer, we use a hybrid system which consists of a unit selection module and prosody modification by STRAIGHT (vocoder type high quality analysis-synthesis method). Our viewpoint is to reduce an amount of prosody mod...

The prosody of a sentence (utterance) when it appears in a discourse context differs substantially from when it is uttered in isolation. This paper addresses why paragraph is a discourse unit and discourse prosody is an intrinsic part of naturally occurring speech. Higher level discourse information treats sentences, phrases and their lower level units as sub-units and layers over them; and rea...