In a data set of 291 spontaneous utterances from German 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults, nuclear pitch contours were labeled manually using the GToBI annotation system. Ten different contour types were identified.The fundamental frequency (F0) of these contours was modeled using third-order orthogonal polynomials, following an approach similar…

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the…

Five French specific syllabification procedures were compared and contrasted both against each other, using lexical analysis, and against human syllable boundary replacement, using a metalinguistic syllable repetition task. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Comparison of the lexical characteristics of 88 auditory misperceptions showed no difference in word-frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency between the actual and the perceived utterances. Another comparison showed that slip of the ear tokens had denser neighborhoods and higher neighborhood frequency than words in general.…

Investigated a new research design for the collection of reliable tone perception data from found children, compared lexical and nonlexical items for testing tone perception ability, and identified the relative ease of perceiving the three basic tone contrasts in Cantonese--high level/high rising, high level/low falling, and high rising/low…

Fricative spectral data are compared with articulatory data from electropalatographic (EPG) recordings in an investigation of coarticulatory effects on the acoustic signal. Data were taken from CV tokens produced by four female speakers of Australian English. Results are presented for coronal fricatives in seven monothong vowel contexts.…

Addresses the issue of using a continuous speech recognition tool to obtain phonetic or phonological representations of speech. Two experiments were carried out in which the performance of a continuous speech recognizer was compared to the performance of expert listeners in a task of judging whether a number of prespecified phones had been…

When church lectors and beginning and advanced drama students read the same passage, the drama students used faster articulation, faster speech rates, and fewer pauses than church lectors. Expert and nonprofessional evaluators preferred the advanced drama students, followed by the beginning drama students and then the church lectors. (Author/RL)

Reports on two experiments comparing the adequacy of naturalistic procedures in emotion-display research with standard procedures. The first experiment explored samples of naturally-occurring emotional speech with free-choice emotion labels, and later with labels from a standard set. The second compared valency ratings of words presented…

Compares the ability of English speakers and Portuguese speakers to learn two complex rhythm patterns observed in languages with primary word stress. Subjects were familiarized with one of two rhythms during a discrimination task, followed by a recognition task that tested whether knowledge of the rhythm generalized to novel stimuli.(Author/VWL)

Examines the effect of redundancy of information on the intelligibility of hearing and deaf children's speech. Based on intelligibility scores obtained for a set of words presented both in context and in isolation, suggests that the children do not use the same production strategies to assist listeners. (Author/MES)

Analyzes the production and perception of illocutionary forms. Using a semantic neutralization procedure, the performance of children (5, 7, and 9 years old) and adults was compared in two experiments focusing on prosodic representations in production and perception tasks. (Author/JL)