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The relation of syntax and prosody (the syntax--prosody interface) has been an active area of research, mostly in linguistics and typically studied under controlled conditions. More recently, prosody has also been successfully used in the…

Speech-to-speech translation systems today do not adequately support use for dialog purposes. In particular, nuances of speaker intent and stance can be lost due to improper prosody transfer. We present an exploration of what needs to be…

In their everyday life, the speech recognition performance of human listeners is influenced by diverse factors, such as the acoustic environment, the talker and listener positions, possibly impaired hearing, and optional hearing devices.…

Speaker identity plays a significant role in human communication and is being increasingly used in societal applications, many through advances in machine learning. Speaker identity perception is an essential cognitive phenomenon that can…

Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…

Prosody plays a vital role in verbal communication. Acoustic cues of prosody have been examined extensively. However, prosodic characteristics are not only perceived auditorily, but also visually based on head and facial movements. The…

Acoustic context effects, where surrounding changes in pitch, rate or timbre influence the perception of a sound, are well documented in speech perception, but how they interact with language background remains unclear. Using a…

The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…

We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…

Prosody is an integral part of communication, but remains an open problem in state-of-the-art speech synthesis. There are two major issues faced when modelling prosody: (1) prosody varies at a slower rate compared with other content in the…

Text-to-speech is now able to achieve near-human naturalness and research focus has shifted to increasing expressivity. One popular method is to transfer the prosody from a reference speech sample. There have been considerable advances in…

Turn-taking is a fundamental aspect of human communication and can be described as the ability to take turns, project upcoming turn shifts, and supply backchannels at appropriate locations throughout a conversation. In this work, we…

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present a review of different recording options for gathering prosodic data in the event that fieldwork is impracticable (e.g. due to pandemics). Under this light, we mimic a long-distance reading…

The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can…

In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…

Acoustic-prosodic entrainment describes the tendency of humans to align or adapt their speech acoustics to each other in conversation. This alignment of spoken behavior has important implications for conversational success. However,…

Recent developments in sensing technologies have enabled us to examine the nature of human social behavior in greater detail. By applying an information theoretic method to the spatiotemporal data of cell-phone locations, [C. Song et al.…

The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…

Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…

Does speaking style variation affect humans' ability to distinguish individuals from their voices? How do humans compare with automatic systems designed to discriminate between voices? In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by…