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Full-Text Articles in Phonetics and Phonology

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner Jan 2017

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …


(In)Variability In The Samoan Syntax/Prosody Interface And Consequences For Syntactic Parsing, Kristine M. Yu, Edward P. Stabler Jan 2017

(In)Variability In The Samoan Syntax/Prosody Interface And Consequences For Syntactic Parsing, Kristine M. Yu, Edward P. Stabler

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

While it has long been clear that prosody should be part of the grammar influencing the action of the syntactic parser, how to bring prosody into computational models of syntactic parsing has remained unclear. The challenge is that prosodic information in the speech signal is the result of the interaction of a multitude of conditioning factors. From this output, how can we factor out the contribution of syntax to conditioning prosodic events? And if we are able to do that factorization and define a production model from the syntactic grammar to a prosodified utterance, how can we then define a …