1,437 research outputs found
The acquisition of English L2 prosody by Italian native speakers: experimental data and pedagogical implications
This paper investigates Yes-No question intonation patterns in English L2, Italian L1, and
English L1. The aim is to test the hypothesis that L2 learners may show different
acquisition strategies for different dimensions of intonation, and particularly the
phonological and phonetic components. The study analyses the nuclear intonation
contours of 4 target English words and 4 comparable Italian words consisting of sonorant
segments, stressed on the semi-final or final syllable, and occurring in Yes-No questions
in sentence-final position (e.g., Will you attend the memorial?, Hai sentito la Melania?).
The words were contained in mini-dialogues of question-answer pairs, and read 5 times
by 4 Italian speakers (Padova area, North-East Italy) and 3 English female speakers
(London area, UK). The results show that: 1) different intonation patterns may be used to
realize the same grammatical function; 2) different developmental processes are at work,
including transfer of L1 categories and the acquisition of L2 phonological categories.
These results suggest that the phonetic dimension of L2 intonation may be more difficult
to learn than the phonological one
Prosodic modules for speech recognition and understanding in VERBMOBIL
Within VERBMOBIL, a large project on spoken language research in Germany, two modules for detecting and recognizing prosodic events have been developed. One module operates on speech signal parameters and the word hypothesis graph, whereas the other module, designed for a novel, highly interactive architecture, only uses speech signal parameters as its input. Phrase boundaries, sentence modality, and accents are detected. The recognition rates in spontaneous dialogs are for accents up to 82,5%, for phrase boundaries up to 91,7%
Automatic prosodic analysis for computer aided pronunciation teaching
Correct pronunciation of spoken language requires the appropriate modulation of acoustic characteristics of speech to convey linguistic information at a suprasegmental level. Such prosodic modulation is a key aspect of spoken language and is an important component of foreign language learning, for purposes of both comprehension and intelligibility. Computer aided pronunciation teaching involves automatic analysis of the speech of a non-native talker in order to provide a diagnosis of the learner's performance in comparison with the speech of a native talker. This thesis describes research undertaken to automatically analyse the prosodic aspects of speech for computer aided pronunciation teaching. It is necessary to describe the suprasegmental composition of a learner's speech in order to characterise significant deviations from a native-like prosody, and to offer some kind of corrective diagnosis. Phonological theories of prosody aim to describe the suprasegmental composition of speech..
Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction,
topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and
topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically
present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in
spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from
the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and
hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based
approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and
Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with,
or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and
automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves
comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no
hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a
significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination
of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic
models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the
literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause
and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas
pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2),
Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200
Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian
Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody
Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian
Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody
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