In this paper, we address the question whether prosodically/linguistically prominent syllables carrying the word accent (stressed syllables) are better indicators for emotional marking than unstressed syllables. To this aim, we use a large spontaneous database with children interacting with Sony’s Aibo robot, annotated with word-based emotion labels, large acoustic-prosodic feature vectors, and...

Acquiring L2 vowel quantity can be difficult for native speakers of languages like English where vowel duration cues stress. This study tested whether English learners of Czech would categorize short and long vowels in a stressed or in an unstressed syllable differently than native listeners. The role of L2 experience was also explored. Results showed that the native and nonnative listeners did...

The roles which word class (open/closed) and sentential stress play in the sentence comprehension processes of both agrammatic (Broca's) aphasics and normal listeners were examined with a word monitoring task. Overall, normal listeners responded more quickly to stressed than to unstressed items, but showed no effect of word class. Aphasics also responded more quickly to stressed than to unstres...

16,105 vowels produced by three speakers of American English were examined using real-time MRI, to provide further insights into tongue shaping and articulatory contrast in stressed and unstressed positions in fluent speech. High front vowels were found to maintain characteristic lingual postures in prosodically weak environments. Non-high vowels were articulated with a more raised dorsum and d...

In this paper, we analyzed the durational differences between learners and native speakers in various speech units from the perspective of that the contrast between the stressed and the unstressed is one of the most important features to characterize stress-timing of English by comparison with mora-timing of Japanese. The results showed that the lengthening and shortening of learner speech were...

This paper proposes an effective decision method focused to evaluate the “stress position”. Conventional methods usually extract the acoustic parameters and compare them to reference in absolute scale, adversely producing unstable results as testing condition changes. To cope with the environmental dependency, the proposed method is designed to be model-based that determines the stressed interv...

This study uses acoustic analysis to determine whether unstressed pretonic high vowels in Lezgi are deleted or devoiced. We argue that the vowel gesture is not deleted, but it is overlapped and consequently devoiced by the preceding [s] gesture. We use spectral analysis to test the increased gestural overlap hypothesis. Three results support this hypothesis and consequently the devoicing interp...

Right ventricular loading leads to diastolic septal flattening in man without necessarily requiring right ventricular pressure to exceed left ventricular pressure. This observation suggested that the unstressed septal configuration is flat and that its normal concave shape is due to the left-to-right transseptal pressure gradient. To examine this hypothesis, we studied septal configuration by t...