Although its role is frequently stressed in acoustic profile for vocal emotion, sound intensity is frequently regarded as a control parameter in neurocognitive studies of vocal emotion, leaving its role and neural underpinnings unclear. To investigate these issues, we asked participants to rate the angry level of neutral and angry prosodies before and after sound intensity modification in Exper...

Sound segments have traditionally occupied a central place in phonetic science. Other sound aspects have been conceptualized in a broader, suprasegmental frame as prosodies, especially pitch, but also energy, voice quality, rhythm. This has resulted in the current dichotomous research paradigm of sounds and prosodies. This paper takes a new look at this division, as a useful initial heuristics ...

BACKGROUND Major depressive disorder (MDD) is an important and highly prevalent mental disorder characterized by anhedonia and a lack of interest in everyday activities. Additionally, patients with MDD appear to have deficits in various cognitive abilities. Although a number of studies investigating the central auditory processing of low-level sound features in patients with MDD have demonstrat...

Previous studies on prosody perception showed inconsistent results concerning the functional role of the hemispheres. One argument for this might be the stimulus material was not sufficiently evaluated. Thus, we developed a corpus which fulfils this requirement. The "Magdeburger Prosodie-Korpus" which was specifically developed for the requirements of fMRI and MEG studies contains two parts. Th...

The aim of the present fMRI-study was to investigate the influence of different word prosodies on the activation of the auditory cortex (AC) of 24 subjects. Pseudowords and semantically neutral words were presented with neutral prosody in experiment I and with emotional prosodies in experiment II. We applied two lexical tasks i.e. detecting words or pseudowords. The control task was to detect p...

This paper takes a new look at the traditionally established divide between sounds and prosodies, viewing it as a useful heuristics in language descriptions that focus on the segmental make- up of words. It pleads for a new approach that bridges this reified compartmentalization of speech in a more global communicative perspective. Data are presented from a German perception experiment in the f...

Generating natural speech with a diverse and smooth prosody pattern is challenging task. Although random sampling phone-level distribution has been investigated to generate different patterns, the diversity of generated still very limited far from what can be achieved by humans. This largely due use uni-modal distribution, such as single Gaussian, in prior works modelling. In this work, we prop...