1,045 research outputs found

    Prominence detected by listeners for future speech synthesis application

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    Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 251-254. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

    Discourse structure and information structure : interfaces and prosodic realization

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    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

    Prosodic features of discourse units

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    A computational memory and processing model for prosody

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    Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-226).This thesis links processing in working memory to prosody in speech, and links different working memory capacities to different prosodic styles. It provides a causal account of prosodic differences and an architecture for reproducing them in synthesized speech. The implemented system mediates text-based information through a model of attention and working memory. The main simulation parameter of the memory model quantifies recall. Changing its value changes what counts as given and new information in a text, and therefore determines the intonation with which the text is uttered. Other aspects of search and storage in the memory model are mapped to the remainder of the continuous and categorical features of pitch and timing, producing prosody in three different styles: for small recall values, the exaggerated and sing-song melodies of children's speech; for mid-range values, an adult expressive style; for the largest values, the prosody of a speaker who is familiar with the text, and at times sounds bored or irritated. In addition, because the storage procedure is stochastic, the prosody from simulation to simulation varies, even for identical control parameters. As with with human speech, no two renditions are alike. Informal feedback indicates that the stylistic differences are recognizable and that the prosody is improved over current offerings. A comparison with natural data shows clear and predictable trends although not at significance. However, a comparison within the natural data also did not produce results at significance. One practical contribution of this work is a text mark-up schema consisting of relational annotations to grammatical structures. Another is the product - varied and plausible prosody in synthesized speech. The main theoretical contribution is to show that resource-bound cognitive activity has prosodic correlates, thus providing a rationale for the individual and stylistic differences in melody and rhythm that are ubiquitous in human speech.by Janet Elizabeth Cahn.Ph.D

    Prosodic Phrasing in Spontaneous Swedish

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    One of the most important functions of prosody is to divide the flow of speech into chunks. The chunking, or prosodic phrasing, of speech plays an important role in both the production and perception of speech. This study represents a move away from the laboratory speech examined in previous, related studies on prosodic phrasing in Swedish, since a spontaneous, Southern Swedish speech material is investigated. The study is, however, not primarily intended as a study of the Southern Swedish dialect; rather Southern Swedish is used as a convenient object on which to test various hypotheses about the phrasing function of prosody in spontaneous speech. The study comprises both analyses of production data and perception experiments, and both the phonetics and phonology of prosodic phrasing is dealt with. First, the distribution of prosodic phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech is examined by considering it as a reflection of optimality theoretic constraints that restrain the production and perception of speech. Secondly, the phonetic realization of prosodic phrase boundaries is investigated in a study on articulation rate changes within the prosodic phrase. Evidence of phrase-final lengthening, a reduction of the articulation rate in the final part of the prosodic phrase, is found. The tonal means used to signal coherence within the prosodic phrase is subsequently investigated. An attempt is made to test the two Lund intonation models’ capacities for describing spontaneous speech. The two approaches have different implications for the amount of preplanning needed, which makes them particularly interesting to compare by testing spontaneous data. The results indicate that no or little preplanning is needed to produce tonally coherent phrases. No evidence is found to suggest e.g. that speakers accommodate for the length of the upcoming phrase by starting longer phrases with a higher F0 than short phrases. An explanation is sought for variation in F0 starting points found in the data despite F0’s insensitivity to phrase length. It is concluded that F0 is used to signal coherence even across prosodic phrase boundaries. It is furthermore found that tonal coherence signals are used to override strong boundary signals in spontaneous speech, thereby making initially unplanned additions possible. Finally, the perception of boundary strength is examined in two perception experiments. Listeners are found to agree well in their perceptual judgments of boundary strength, and it is shown that the main correlate to perceived boundary strength in spontaneous speech is pause length. The useful distinction between weak, prosodic phrase boundaries and strong, prosodic utterance boundaries in descriptions of read speech is found to be inappropriate for descriptions of spontaneous speech. It fails to capture the conflicting local and global signals of boundary strength and coherence that arise when strong boundary signals are overriden by coherence signals. The possibility to use conflicting signals in this way is seen as an important asset to the speaker as it makes changes in the speech plan possible, and it is regarded to be a characteristic of prosodic phrasing in spontaneous speech

    Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies

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    Wagner P, Cwiek A, Samlowski B. Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies. In: Draxler C, Kleber F, eds. Tagungsband der 12. Tagung Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum. München, Deutschland: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; 2016: 211-214

    Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies

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    Wagner P, Cwiek A, Samlowski B. Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies. In: Draxler C, Kleber F, eds. Tagungsband der 12. Tagung Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum. München, Deutschland: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; 2016: 211-214

    Evidence for Prosody in Silent Reading

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    English speakers and expressive readers emphasize new content in an ongoing discourse. Do silent readers emphasize new content in their inner voice? Because the inner voice cannot be directly observed, we borrowed the cap-emphasis technique (e.g., “toMAYto”) from the pronunciation guides of dictionaries to elicit prosodic emphasis. Extrapolating from linguistic theories of focus prosody in spoken English, we predicted and found that silent readers in experiment 1 preferred cap-emphasized, newsworthy content (“James stole the BRACELET ) when the just-read story left them wondering what was stolen (compared with control trials). Readers preferred “JAMES stole the bracelet” when left wondering who the thief was. Experiment 2 generalized our findings to newsworthy function words and to a new behavioral measure, reaction time. As predicted, “He CAN” was judged more quickly and accurately following “Can he swim,” whereas “HE can” was judged more quickly and accurately following “Who can swim?” Our results suggest that readers engage focus prosody when they read silently
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