GoalGetter: predicting contrastive accent in data-to-speech generation

This paper addresses the problem of predicting contrastive accent in spoken language generation. The common strategy of accenting 'new' and deaccenting 'old' information is not sufficient to achieve correct accentuation: generation of contrastive accent is required as well. I will discuss a few approaches to the prediction of contrastive accent, and propose a practical solution which avoids the problems these approaches are faced with. These issues are discussed in the context of GoalGetter, a data-to-speech system which generates spoken reports of football matches on the basis of tabular information

The contrastive value of lexical stress in visual word recognition: Evidence from spanish

Resumen tomado de la publicaciónEl valor contrastivo del acento léxico en el reconocimiento visual de palabras: evidencia del español. Antecedentes: muchos pares de palabras en español, en particular muchas formas verbales, difieren solo en la sílaba acentuada, tal como aNImo y aniMÓ. Así el acento puede adquirir un valor contrastivo que fue confirmado por Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastian y Mehler (1997) en español, pero no en francés, en percepción auditiva. Método: este estudio contrasta el efecto de primado en pares de palabras que difieren en su patrón de acentuación con el efecto de repetición, el primado solo de acento (sin relación ortográfica) y el primado morfológico en reconocimiento visual de palabras. Resultados: usando priming enmascarado se obtuvo facilitación para los pares con diferente acento (rasGÓ/RASgo) comparando con los pares sin relación (dorMÍ/RASgo), pero no se produjo comparando con los no relacionados de igual acento (PERsa/RASgo). Sin embargo, los pares idénticos (RASgo-RASgo) produjeron facilitación comparando con ambas condiciones ortográficamente relacionadas. Con un SOA largo los pares con diferente acento (ortográficamente iguales) produjeron una facilitación significativa, como ocurrió con los pares relacionados morfológicos (RASga/RASgo), sobre los pares ortográficamente diferentes (PERsa/RASgo). Conclusión: estos resultados confirman la importancia del procesamiento temprano y preléxico del acento para la selección léxica en español, como ocurre con las características ortográficas y fonológicas de las palabras.Universidad de Oviedo. Biblioteca de Psicología; Plaza Feijoo, s/n.; 33003 Oviedo; Tel. +34985104146; Fax +34985104126; [email protected]

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

Is speech rhythmic? In the absence of evidence for a traditional view that languages strive to coordinate either syllables or stress-feet with regular time intervals, we consider the alternative that languages exhibit contrastive rhythm subsisting merely in the alternation of stronger and weaker elements. This is initially plausible, particularly for languages with a steep ‘prominence gradient’, i.e. a large disparity between stronger and weaker elements; but we point out that alternation is poorly achieved even by a ‘stress-timed’ language such as English, and, historically, languages have conspicuously failed to adopt simple phonological remedies that would ensure alternation. Languages seem more concerned to allow ‘syntagmatic contrast’ between successive units and to use durational effects to support linguistic functions than to facilitate rhythm. Furthermore, some languages (e.g. Tamil, Korean) lack the lexical prominence which would most straightforwardly underpin prominence alternation. We conclude that speech is not incontestibly rhythmic, and may even be antirhythmic. However, its linguistic structure and patterning allow the metaphorical extension of rhythm in varying degrees and in different ways depending on the language, and that it is this analogical process which allows speech to be matched to external rhythms

Beat that Word : How Listeners Integrate Beat Gesture and Focus in Multimodal Speech Discourse

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Phonology and intonation

The encoding standards for phonology and intonation are designed to facilitate consistent annotation of the phonological and intonational aspects of information structure, in languages across a range ofprosodic types. The guidelines are designed with the aim that a nonspecialist in phonology can both implement and interpret the resulting annotation

Discourse structure and information structure : interfaces and prosodic realization

In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch