Focus to emphasize tone analysis for prosodic generation

AbstractEmphasizing prosody of a sentence at its focus part when producing a speaker’s utterance can improve the recognition rate to hearers and reduce its ambiguity. Our objective is to address this challenge by analysing the concept of foci in speech utterances and the relationship of focus, speaker’s intention and prosody. Our investigation is aimed at understanding and modelling how a speaker’s utterances are influenced by the speaker’s intentions. The relationship between speaker’s intentions and focus information is used to consider which parts of the sentence serve as the focus parts. We propose using the Focus to Emphasize Tone (FET) analysis, which includes: (i) generating the constraints for foci, speaker’s intention and prosodic features, (ii) defining the intonation patterns, (iii) labelling a set of prosodic marks for a sentence. We also design the FET structure to support our analysis and to contain focus, speaker’s intention and prosodic components. An implementation of the system is described and the evaluation results on the CMU Communicator (CMU–COM) dataset are presented

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

Etunimien syntaktiset ja prosodiset muodot monenkeskisessä institutionaalisessa vuorovaikutuksessa

This paper examines one aspect of turn-taking organization in institutional interactions: the use of first names and their prosodic marking for next-speaker selection. Institutional interaction is characterized by asymmetrical rights to talk and pre-allocation of action. This involves the restriction of one party to asking questions and the other to responding to them. The analysis focuses on two of these multiparty formal situations: co-present classroom participants and live interactive television broadcast with remote participants. In each context, turn allocation is determined by one party: the teacher or TV host. After asking a question as a sequence-initiating action, the teacher or host designates the next speaker by name. The use of first names is situatedly examined in terms of turn-taking organization and prosodic characteristics. The study examines how the prosodic marking is context-sensitive: do the participants have visual access to each other’s actions and how is a name used to attract attention? This paper analyses the formation and maintaining of a mutual orientation towards a single conversational action: selecting and giving the floor to a co-participant of the conversation in an institutional framework. These detailed descriptions of the sequential order are based on ethnomethodologically-informed conversation analysis. The objective is to compare four “single cases”, preserving the specificities and “whatness” of each excerpt.Peer reviewe

Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases

Cue phrases are linguistic expressions such as now and well that function as explicit indicators of the structure of a discourse. For example, now may signal the beginning of a subtopic or a return to a previous topic, while well may mark subsequent material as a response to prior material, or as an explanatory comment. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each also has one or more alternate uses. While incidentally may be used sententially as an adverbial, for example, the discourse use initiates a digression. Although distinguishing discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases is critical to the interpretation and generation of discourse, the question of how speakers and hearers accomplish this disambiguation is rarely addressed. This paper reports results of empirical studies on discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases, in which both text-based and prosodic features were examined for disambiguating power. Based on these studies, it is proposed that discourse versus sentential usage may be distinguished by intonational features, specifically, pitch accent and prosodic phrasing. A prosodic model that characterizes these distinctions is identified. This model is associated with features identifiable from text analysis, including orthography and part of speech, to permit the application of the results of the prosodic analysis to the generation of appropriate intonational features for discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases in synthetic speech

Speech dysprosody but no music ‘dysprosody’ in Parkinson’s disease

AbstractParkinson’s disease is characterized not only by bradykinesia, rigidity, and tremor, but also by impairments of expressive and receptive linguistic prosody. The facilitating effect of music with a salient beat on patients’ gait suggests that it might have a similar effect on vocal behavior, however it is currently unknown whether singing is affected by the disease. In the present study, fifteen Parkinson patients were compared with fifteen healthy controls during the singing of familiar melodies and improvised melodic continuations. While patients’ speech could reliably be distinguished from that of healthy controls matched for age and gender, purely on the basis of aural perception, no significant differences in singing were observed, either in pitch, pitch range, pitch variability, and tempo, or in scale tone distribution, interval size or interval variability. The apparent dissociation of speech and singing in Parkinson’s disease suggests that music could be used to facilitate expressive linguistic prosody

Analyzing Navajo Discourse: Investigating Form and Function of Intonational Units in Referential Discourse

Extensive research has been conducted on the Navajo verb complex (prefix morphology) and specific constructions (i.e. relative clause structure, subject-object-inversion), but to date the proposed establishment of a method to analyze actual discourse from a functional or usage based approach has not occurred. The goal of this study is twofold. The first is to establish a method to analyze spoken Navajo using the Intonation Units (IU) as a measure as it occurs in natural, uninterrupted speech, according to the parameters outlined by Chafe (1994), and show the influence of the morphological complexity of Navajo on the size of the IU. Secondly, analyzing the function of the IU within discourse from the intonation-as-information-flow\u27 approach (Couper-Kuhlen 2005) including deliberate manipulation by speakers in a sequential manner and the framing in which story threads are woven together expressing various points of view within a single text. IUs (Chafe 1994, DuBois et al. 1993) are portions of speech occurring under a single prosodic contour that reveal how speakers naturally segment their speech. Prosodic structure, including the suprasegmental phonetic cues of intonation, pitch, rhythm, duration and pauses, has been studied in many languages, but to date, there has not been an analysis of Navajo that has attempted to define an IU and its function in discourse. The hope is the research presented will leave the reader with a better understanding of communicative process, how syntactic structural features are interrelated to cognitive constraints and interlocutor motivation which ultimately may influence and impact actual performance which are revealed via various voices (Dinwoodie 1999) represented within a text. By proposing a unit larger than the morphologically complex verb for analysis, a specific type of clause (i.e., relative or subordinate), or even a culturally relevant structure (i.e., subject-object inversion), the desire is the results presented will both foster and aid subsequent Navajo discourse analysis studies and ultimately positively impact Navajo language education efforts

短语切分、重点突出与形态声调学：永宁摩梭话的语句如何形成声调组

International audienceYongning Na is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in an area straddling the border between Yunnan and Sichuan. The Yongning Na tone system is based on three levels: L, M, and H. It comprises a host of rules that are specific to certain morphosyntactic contexts. These rules represent the bulk of what language learners must acquire to master the tone system. Different rules apply in the association of a verb with a subject or an object, the association of two nouns into a compound, that of a numeral and classifier, and that of a word and its affixes, for instance. The domain of tonal computation is referred to here as the tone group; tonal processes never apply across tone-group junctures. The present study investigates how utterances are divided into tone groups in Yongning Na, building on examples from narratives and elicited combinations. There is no hard-and-fast correspondence between syntactic structure and tone group divisions: several options are generally open for the division of an utterance into tone groups. The choice among these options depends on considerations of information structure. This study is intended as a stepping-stone towards the long-term goal of modelling the Na tonal system (its morpho-phonology and its phonetics), and placing the findings in a typological perspective.永宁摩梭话（纳语）是汉藏语族纳语组的一种语言，位于云南跟四川交界地带的永宁坝与泸沽湖地区。永宁纳语的声调系统有高、中、低三个调域。本文介绍和分析纳语中的语句如何被划分为“声调组”。选择何种声调组往往反映了语句不同的信息结构。由于句法结构跟声调组的切分没有硬性直接的对应，说话人可以选择将一个大的组块整合为一个声调组，从而形成强整合，或者也可以把语句分成一些声调组，加强不同成分的风格效应。论文用详细的例子展示了在语句分为声调组的过程中说话人选择某种变调类型的动机。结构越紧密的语句，其可能划分的声调组就越少。而当出现富于表现力的或较生动的某个词时，句子便会用声调来切分