Studies of speech tempo commonly use syllable or segment rate as a proxy measure for perceived tempo. In languages whose phonologies allow substantial syllable complexity these measures can produce figures on quite different scales; however, little is known about the correlation between syllable and segment rate measurements on the one hand and naïve listeners’ tempo judgements on the other. We...

The claim that the syllable constitutes a basic perceptual unit in French is commonly accepted. It is based in part on the syllable effect [1] obtained with words. The present study extends these syllable detection experiments to pseudowords. Four experiments failed to replicate the syllable effect observed on words. Detection responses in pseudowords are made as soon as sufficient information ...

This paper presents a syllable-based approach to unsupervised pattern discovery from speech. By first segmenting speech into syllable-like units, the system is able to limit potential word onsets and offsets to a finite number of candidate locations. These syllable tokens are then described using a set of features and clustered into a finite number of syllable classes. Finally, recurring syllab...

It is well known that Chinese is a tone language with multi-tone system, but the distinctive syllable structures relating to speech recognition have not brought to phoneticians' attention yet. The syllable structures, the phonotactic rules were discussed and the joint probability of the initials and the finals were given in this paper. A comparative study of the relative information transmitted...

This paper presents a keyword spotting method based on searching a syllable lattice structure. The Mandarin syllables are represented in initial-final models. By one-stage dynamic programming, an utterance is converted into a sequence of topN-candidate syllables. It comes out a syllable lattice structure for this input utterance. A vocabulary of predefined keywords is represented as a set of sy...

This paper proposes an approach for modeling prosody patterns of acoustic features of Chinese expressive speech. In a Chinese multi-syllabic prosodic word, a syllable is identified as the core syllable based on the observation that speaker usually puts more emphasis on such syllable. The variations of the acoustic features migrating from neutral to expressive speech are then analyzed for both t...

This paper proposes a syllable-based Thai duration model using multi-level linear regression and syllable accommodation. To build a timing model reflecting control characteristics directly, we introduce two analysis results on hierarchical control characteristics. First analysis result showed that syllable is highly correlated to higher-phone-level timing controls, while, phone differences by t...

In this paper, the syllable, an alternative phonetic unit to the phone, is researched in the context of speech synthesis. Several approaches to syllable modelling within the statistical approach (using hidden Markov models) to the acoustic unit inventory creation are proposed and evaluated. To be able to synthesize an arbitrary text, the syllable inventories were supplemented with triphones res...

This study investigated the encoding of syllable boundary information during speech production in Dutch. Based on Levelt's model of phonological encoding, we hypothesized segments and syllable boundaries to be encoded in an incremental way. In a self-monitoring experiment, decisions about the syllable affiliation (first or second syllable) of a pre-specified consonant, which was the third phone...

Mouse pups vocalize at high rates when they are cold or isolated from the nest. The proportions of each syllable type produced carry information about disease state and are being used as behavioral markers for the internal state of animals. Manual classifications of these vocalizations identified 10 syllable types based on their spectro-temporal features. However, manual classification of mouse...