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According to well-established views, language has several subsystems where each subsystem (e.g. syntax, morphology, phonology) operates on the basis of hierarchically organised units. When it comes to the graphematic structure of words, however, the received view appears to be that linear structure is all that matters. Contrary to this view, a sub-field of writing systems research emerges that can be called non-linear or supra-segmental graphematics. Drawing on parallels with supra-segmental phonology, supra-segmental graphematics claims the existence and relevance of cross-linguistically available building blocks, such as the syllable and the foot, in alphabetical writing systems, such as the writing systems of German and English. This book explores the graphematic hierarchy with a special focus on the unit foot. Structural, experimental and databased evidence is presented in favour of this approach. In addition, analyses within the optimality theory framework are offered. This work shows that the supra-segmental graphematic approaches are superior to linear ones with respect to explanatory strength and even preciseness of the description. It is thus interesting for academics concerned with writing systems and orthography teaching.
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.
This book presents a collection of pioneering papers reflecting current methods in prosody research with a focus on Romance languages. The rapid expansion of the field of prosody research in the last decades has given rise to a proliferation of methods that has left little room for the critical assessment of these methods. The aim of this volume is to bridge this gap by embracing original contributions, in which experts in the field assess, reflect, and discuss different methods of data gathering and analysis. The book might thus be of interest to scholars and established researchers as well as to students and young academics who wish to explore the topic of prosody, an expanding and promising area of study.
Facial animations capable of articulating accurate movements in synchrony with a speech track have become a subject of much research during the past decade. Most of these efforts have focused on articulation of lip and tongue movements, since these are the primary sources of information in speech reading. However, a wealth of paralinguistic information is implicitly conveyed through visual prosody (e.g., head and eyebrow movements). In contrast with lip/tongue movements, however, for which the articulation rules are fairly well known (i.e., viseme-phoneme mappings, coarticulation), little is known about the generation of visual prosody. The objective of this thesis is to explore the perceptual contributions of visual prosody in speech-driven facial avatars. Our main hypothesis is that visual prosody driven by acoustics of the speech signal, as opposed to random or no visual prosody, results in more realistic, coherent and convincing facial animations. To test this hypothesis, we have developed an audio-visual system capable of capturing synchronized speech and facial motion from a speaker using infrared illumination and retro-reflective markers. In order to elicit natural visual prosody, a story-telling experiment was designed in which the actors were shown a short cartoon video, and subsequently asked to narrate the episode. From this audio-visual data, four different facial animations were generated, articulating no visual prosody, Perlin-noise, speech-driven movements, and ground truth movements. Speech-driven movements were driven by acoustic features of the speech signal (e.g., fundamental frequency and energy) using rule-based heuristics and autoregressive models. A pair-wise perceptual evaluation shows that subjects can clearly discriminate among the four visual prosody animations. It also shows that speech-driven movements and Perlin-noise, in that order, approach the performance of veridical motion. The results are quite promising and suggest that speech-driven motion could outperform Perlin-noise if more powerful motion prediction models are used. In addition, our results also show that exaggeration can bias the viewer to perceive a computer generated character to be more realistic motion-wise.
Traditionally, research on human language has taken speech and written language as the only domains of investigation. However, there is now a wealth of empirical studies documenting visual aspects of language, ranging from rich studies of sign languages, which are self-contained visual language systems, to the field of gesture studies, which examines speech-associated gestures, facial expressions, and other bodily movements related to communicative expressions. But despite this large body of work, sign language and gestures are rarely treated together in theoretical discussions. This volume aims to remedy that by considering both types of visual language jointly in order to transcend (artificial) theoretical divides, and to arrive at a comprehensive account of the human language faculty. This collection seeks to pave the way for an inherently multimodal view of language, in which visible actions of the body play a crucial role. The 19 papers in this volume address four broad and overlapping topics: (1) the multimodal nature of language; (2) multimodal representation of meaning; (3) multimodal and multichannel prosody; and (4) acquisition and development of visual language in children and adults.
While most natural languages rely on speech, humans can spontaneously generate comparable linguistic systems that utilize manual gestures. This collection of papers examines the interaction between natural language and its phonetic vessels—human speech or manual gestures. We seek to identify what linguistic aspects are invariant across signed and spoken languages, and determine how the choice of the phonetic vessel shapes language structure, its processing and its neural implementation. We welcome rigorous empirical studies from a wide variety of perspectives, ranging from behavioral studies to brain analyses, diverse ages (from infants to adults), and multiple languages—both conventional and emerging home signs and sign languages.
The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics provides a comprehensive and up-to-date compilation of research, history and techniques in phonetics. With contributions from 41 prominent authors from North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, and including over 130 figures to illustrate key points, this handbook covers all the most important areas in the field, including: • the history and scope of techniques used, including speech synthesis, vocal tract imaging techniques, and obtaining information on under-researched languages from language archives; • the physiological bases of speech and hearing, including auditory, articulatory, and neural explanations of hearing, speech, and language processes; • theories and models of speech perception and production related to the processing of consonants, vowels, prosody, tone, and intonation; • linguistic phonetics, with discussions of the phonetics-phonology interface, sound change, second language acquisition, sociophonetics, and second language teaching research; • applications and extensions, including phonetics and gender, clinical phonetics, and forensic phonetics. The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics will be indispensable reading for students and practitioners in the fields of speech, language, linguistics and hearing sciences.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Appliations, AIMSA 2002, held in Varna, Bulgaria in September 2002. The 26 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The papers address a broad spectrum of topics in AI, including natural language processing, computational learning, Machine learning, AI planning, heuristics, neural information processing, adaptive systems, computational linguistics, multi-agent systems, AI logic, knowledge management, and information retrieval.
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