During natural speech perception, listeners rely on a wide range of cues to support comprehension, from semantic context to prosodic information. There is a general consensus that prosody plays a role in syntactic parsing, but most studies focusing on ambiguous relative clauses (RC) show that prosodic cues, alone, are insufficient to reverse the preferred interpretation of sentence. These findi...

In this paper, a new approach for improved spontaneous Mandarin speech recognition using Latent Prosodic Modeling (LPM) for disfluency interruption point (IP) detection is presented. The basic idea is to detect the disfluency interruption points (IPs) prior to the recognition, and then to incorporate these information into the recognition process via the second pass rescoring. For accurate dete...

Theories of language production need to account for how speakers produce prosodic structure. Very few models have addressed the role of prosodic phrasing in speech planning, and little experimental work examining this question has been conducted so far. Four studies designed to investigate the effect of phrase length and prosodic phrasing on speech planning are presented. The first experiment e...

PURPOSE This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). METHOD Thirty-one children with HFA, 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age, and 33 adults with normal speech completed the prosody assessment procedure, Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children. RESULTS Chi...

Disfluencies, when present in speech signal, can make syntactic parsing difficult. This difficulty is increased when machines are involved in communication and when speech devices rely on automatic speech recognition techniques. In order to improve automatic speech parsing and thus speech comprehension, methods have been proposed to filter disfluencies out from the speech signal. Attempts have ...

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hiddenMarkov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We e...