Cette thèse a pour objectif de décrire les caractéristiques prosodiques du phonostyle particulier de l’ex-Président du Vénézuéla Hugo Chávez dans le phonogenre «discours public ‘spontané’» ainsi que dans trois autres phonogenres. J’analyse également le phonostyle d’autres personnalités politiques de l’Amérique hispanophone et de l’Espagne dans le même phonogenre «discours public».Dans une étude préliminaire de reconnaissance perceptive utilisant de la parole filtrée et naturelle, 12 personnalités politiques ont été décrites (d’abord en choix libre puis en choix forcé) et ensuite classées dans quatre groupes différents allant du plus ‘tribun’ ‘révolutionnaire’, ‘fort’ et ‘autoritaire’ jusqu’au plus ‘traditionnel’ ‘calme’ et ‘formel’. Chávez est classé à l’extrême des ‘tribuns’ et l’ex-Premier ministre espagnol José Zapatero à l’extrême des ‘traditionnels’.L’analyse acoustique montre que Chávez a un phonostyle très particulier, caractérisé par la répétition régulière d’un type de contour en fin de groupe intonatif (GI). Ce contour est montant sur la syllabe accentuée et descendant d’une octave sur la dernière syllabe inaccentuée du mot, qui est d’ailleurs allongée de façon significative. À l’extrémité opposée, du classement perceptif, Zapatero, a un phonostyle caractérisé par l’utilisation d’un contour montant sur la syllabe accentuée continuant la montée sur la syllabe inaccentuée suivante, en fin de GI, et par le découpage des énoncés en petits blocs. Les différentes expériences, utilisant la parole synthétique (TTS Synthesis), confirment les résultats de l’analyse acoustique et auditive.Toutes les autres personnalités politiques ont été analysées et classées dans un ‘dégradé’ allant du plus ‘tribun’ au plus ‘traditionnel’, de la même façon qu’en perception, entre les deux extrêmes, Chávez et Zapatero. Ce classement en production correspond globalement à celui effectué préalablement en perception. / The aim of this thesis is to describe the prosodic characteristics of the peculiar phonostyle used by the ex-President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, in the “spontaneous public speech” phonogenre, as well as in three other speaking styles. The phonostyles of other Spanish-speaking politicians from Hispanic America and Spain are also assessed in the same public speech phonogenre.In a preliminary perceptual study using both filtered and natural voices, participants were asked to describe 12 politicians first using a free choice paradigm and then forced choice. Based on the results of this perceptual study, the politicians were then classified into four different groups from the most “powerful orator”, “revolutionary”, “strong” and “authoritarian” to the most “traditional”, “quiet” and “formal”. Chávez is classed in the extreme group of “power orators” and the Spanish ex-Prime Minister, José Zapatero, is placed in the opposing traditional group.Acoustic analysis shows that Chávez has a very peculiar phonostyle, characterized by the regular repetition of a certain type of contour at the end of Intonation Phrases (IP). This contour rises on the stressed syllable and falls by one octave on the last unstressed syllable of the word, which is also lengthened in a significant way. On the opposite end of the perceptual scale, Zapatero’s phonostyle is characterized by the use of a rising contour on the stressed syllable, which continues to rise into the following unstressed syllable at the end of the IP. He also cuts utterances into small chunks. Various experiments using voice synthesis (TTS Synthesis) confirm the findings of the acoustic and perceptual analysis.The productions of the other politicians were analyzed and classified in the same ranking as in the perception study, from the most “powerful orator” to more “traditional” between the two extremes, Chávez and Zapatero. This production ranking generally corresponds to the one previously carried out in perception.

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This dissertation broaches the question of whether children can use this information in syntax acquisition by asking if learners can use the prosodic correlates of clauses to locate syntactic constituents. One property of certain syntactic constituents in natural languages is that they can move, so learning of constituency was inferred if participants treated prosodically-grouped words as cohesive, moveable chunks. In Experiment 1, 19-month-olds were familiarized with sentences from an artificial grammar with either 1-clause or 2-clause prosody. The infants from the 2-clause group later recognized the prosodically-marked clauses when they had moved to a new position in the sentence and had a new acoustic contour. Adults in Experiment 2 showed similar learning, although their judgments also rely on recognition of perceptually-salient words at prosodic boundaries. Subsequent experiments explored the mechanisms underlying this prosodic bootstrapping by testing Japanese-acquiring infants on English-based stimuli (Experiment 3) and English-acquiring infants on Japanese-based stimuli (Experiment 4). Infants were able to locate constituent-like groups of words with both native and non-native prosody, suggesting that the acoustic correlates of prosody are sufficiently robust across languages that they can be used in early syntax acquisition without extensive exposure to language-specific prosodic features. On the other hand, adults (Experiment 5) are less flexible, and are only able to use prosody consistent with their native language, suggesting an age- or experience-related tuning of the prosodic perceptual mechanism. This dissertation supports prosody as an important cue that allows infants and young children to break into syntax even before they understand many words, and helps explain the rapid rate of syntax acquisition.

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This thesis proposes to improve and enrich the expressiveness of English Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis by identifying and generating natural patterns of prosodic prominence. In most state-of-the-art TTS systems the prediction from text of prosodic prominence relations between words in an utterance relies on features that very loosely account for the combined effects of syntax, semantics, word informativeness and salience, on prosodic prominence. To improve prosodic prominence prediction we first follow up the classic approach in which prosodic prominence patterns are flattened into binary sequences of pitch accented and pitch unaccented words. We propose and motivate statistic and syntactic dependency based features that are complementary to the most predictive features proposed in previous works on automatic pitch accent prediction and show their utility on both read and spontaneous speech. Different accentuation patterns can be associated to the same sentence. Such variability rises the question on how evaluating pitch accent predictors when more patterns are allowed. We carry out a study on prosodic symbols variability on a speech corpus where different speakers read the same text and propose an information-theoretic definition of optionality of symbolic prosodic events that leads to a novel evaluation metric in which prosodic variability is incorporated as a factor affecting prediction accuracy. We additionally propose a method to take advantage of the optionality of prosodic events in unit-selection speech synthesis. To better account for the tight links between the prosodic prominence of a word and the discourse/sentence context, part of this thesis goes beyond the accent/no-accent dichotomy and is devoted to a novel task, the automatic detection of contrast, where contrast is meant as a (Information Structure’s) relation that ties two words that explicitly contrast with each other. This task is mainly motivated by the fact that contrastive words tend to be prosodically marked with particularly prominent pitch accents. The identification of contrastive word pairs is achieved by combining lexical information, syntactic information (which mainly aims to identify the syntactic parallelism that often activates contrast) and semantic information (mainly drawn from the Word- Net semantic lexicon), within a Support Vector Machines classifier. Once we have identified patterns of prosodic prominence we propose methods to incorporate such information in TTS synthesis and test its impact on synthetic speech naturalness trough some large scale perceptual experiments. The results of these experiments cast some doubts on the utility of a simple accent/no-accent distinction in Hidden Markov Model based speech synthesis while highlight the importance of contrastive accents.

This thesis tests the early incorporation of prosodic information during on-line processing of ambiguous word pairs such as Packing cases. The word pair is syntactically ambiguous between a noun or verb phrase interpretation. However, the two interpretations are prosodically distinct. An on-line, cross-modal, response-time task found that subjects disambiguated the word pairs using prosodic information. Experiment 2 swapped the timing,f_o and amplitude of the noun phrase versions with the verb phrase versions. If prosodic information were guiding parsing, swapping the prosody of the alternatives should change subjects' parses of the word-pairs. Subjects interpreted the cross-synthesised noun phrases as verb phrases and the crosssynthesised verb phrases as noun phrases. This provides additional evidence in favour of early prosodic processing. Experiment 3 tested whether subjects' ability to differentiate the two forms would be affected by flattening the f_o of the word pairs. Subjects' ability to disambiguate the word pairs was reduced by flattening the f_o of the stimuli. Again, this provides evidence in favour of f_o guiding parsing. Experiment 4 investigated the perceptual salience of prosodic information in the absence of lexical information, by testing parsing of delexicalised versions of the same wordpairs. Subjects continued to disambiguate the stimuli. This indicates that prosody can guide parsing even without lexical information. The results of the four experiments provide strong evidence in favour of the early incorporation of prosodic information in parsing: prosodic information can influence on-line parsing even in the presence of contradictory syntactic and spectral preferences; and in the absence of lexical information. This thesis concludes that the results of the experiments support strong interaction models of processing.

Thèse (M.Ling.) -- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, programme extensionné de l'Université Laval, 2003. / Bibliogr.: f. [105]-127. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [100]-111).

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Stockholm. / Errata slip inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-109).

The current dissertation represents one of the first systematic studies of the distribution of speech errors within supralexical prosodic units. Four experiments were conducted to gain insight into the specific role of these units in speech planning and production. The first experiment focused on errors in adult English. These were found to be systematically distributed within the highest-level supralexical prosodic unit, the Intonational Phrase (IP), providing evidence for its psychological reality. The specific distribution of errors--fewest in unit-initial position, with a gradual increase in errors across the unit--was interpreted to suggest that the IP functions as a planning domain: the unit is activated as a whole, and activation gradually decays with time leading to an increase in errors. The second experiment was motivated by the idea that a decrease in IP activation is best understood in the context of working memory processes. Children's speech was examined in preference to adult speech because it is less automatized and so likely more influenced by working memory. The findings were that children with better working memories produced shorter IPs and relatively more anticipatory errors than children with poorer working memories. The results provided further evidence for the role of IPs in planning. The third and fourth experiments extended the investigation to another language, Korean, and examined the role of a mid-level prosodic unit, the Accentual Phrase (AP), in planning and production. The results indicated the same pattern of error distribution in the Korean IP as in the English IP. In contrast, more errors occurred in AP-initial position than in the second half of the unit, and the elicited errors tended to preserve AP-internal structure. The results were interpreted to suggest that the AP provides a structural frame within which elements are slotted for production. Overall, the results are consistent with the idea that these units play a critical role in the planning and production process. The results also suggest that different units within the prosodic hierarchy function differently: the IP functions as a planning domain, and mid-level units (i.e., AP) provide the structure needed to accomplish serial ordering in speech. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.