In this letter, we present useful features accounting for pronunciation prominence and propose a classification technique for prominence detection. A set of phone-specific features are extracted based on a forced alignment of the test pronunciation provided by a speech recognition system. These features are then applied to the traditional classifiers such as the support vector machine (SVM), ar...

0. Combinations of Sonority and Stress In their analysis of Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification, Prince and Smolensky (1993) postulate that different types of prominence, such as sonority and syllabicity, should align—a phenomenon they term prominence alignment. This concept is implemented by Prince and Smolensky using families of inherently-ranked constraints that are derived from combini...

The present study mainly investigates the interaction of syntaxmarked focus and wh-question induced focus on the formation of F0 patterns in Standard Chinese (Hereinafter, SC). Acoustic experiment demonstrates that the syntax-marked (lian or shi) focus can co-exist with the wh-question induced focus. The results are two folds: (i) the two kinds of focuses can add together to trigger more obviou...

The perception of prosodic prominence is known to be influenced by several distinct factors. In this study, we investigated the role of context, both global and local, in the prominence judgements of naı̈ve listeners. Monolingual English listeners marked where they heard prominence on pairs of twoword phrases (e.g. blue ball, green drum). Stimuli varied in whether or not the first phrase implied...

Control of prosody is essential for the synthesis of natural sounding speech. Text-to-speech systems tend to accent too many words when taking into account only the distinction between open-class and closed-class words. In the prominence-based approach [1], the degree of accentuation of a syllable is described in terms of a gradual prominence parameter. This paper presents the calculation of th...

Research in audiovisual prosody has shown that typically beat gestures are temporally integrated with prominent positions in speech (e.g., [1, 2]). There is independent evidence that both prosodic prominence (e.g., pitch accents) and gestural prominence associated with words (e.g., beat gestures) facilitate the recall of information (e.g., [3, 4, 5]). However, previous studies did not directly ...

PURPOSE Tonic seizures and the tonic phase of tonic-clonic epileptic seizures are defined as "sustained tonic" muscle contraction lasting a few seconds to minutes. Visual inspection of the surface electromyogram (EMG) during seizures contributed considerably to a better understanding and accurate diagnosis of several seizure types. However, quantitative analysis of the surface EMG during the ep...