Session Prosody V:

Prosody V: Phrasing

Type: oral
Chair: Martine Grice
Date: Tuesday - August 07, 2007
Time: 13:20
Room: 1 (Red)

 

Prosody V-1 Prosodic disambiguation from deep syntactic structures
Philipp von Böselager, IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne
Berthold Crysmann, DFKI & Saarland University
Paper File
  In this paper, we report on an experiment showing how the introduction of detailed prosodic infor­ma­tion into synthetic speech leads to better disam­big­u­ation of structurally am­biguous sen­tences. Using mod­ifier attachment (MA) am­bigu­ities and sub­ject/object fronting (OF) in Ger­man as test cases, we show that prosody which is auto­mat­ically gen­era­ted from deep syntactic infor­ma­tion can lead to considerable disambig­uation ef­fects, and can even override a strong semantics-driven bias. The ar­chitec­ture used in the ex­periment, con­sis­ting of a large-scale generator for Ger­man, a prosody mod­ule, and the speech syn­thesis system MARY is shown to be a valuable plat­form for testing hypo­theses in in­to­na­tion studies.
Prosody V-2 On the edge: Acoustic cues to layered prosodic domains
Tae-Jin Yoon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jennifer Cole, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Paper File
  Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their interaction with phrasal stress (pitch-accent) at three levels of prosodic structure: Word, ip, and IP. Evidence for acoustic effects of prosodic boundary is shown in measures of duration local to the domain-final rhyme. These findings provide strong evidence for prosodic theory, showing acoustic correlates of a 3-way distinction in boundary level.
Prosody V-3 Minimum size constraints on Intermediate Phrases
Gorka Elordieta, University of the Basque Country
Paper File Additional Files
  In Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB), Intermediate Phrases (ips) align by default with the left edge of syntactic phrases. The main intonational cue of ips is partial pitch reset at their left edges. A minimal size constraint applies on ips occurring at the left edge of an Intonational Phrase (IP), requiring that they consist of at least two Accentual Phrases (APs). Following [9]’s idea that certain prominent positions demand augmentation, the NBB facts show that the left edge of an IP can also be a phonologically prominent position.

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