Prominence in Conversational Speech - Pitch Accent, Contrast and Givenness

Learn about the acoustic and linguistic properties of prominence in conversational speech through this seminar lecture that examines the relationship between pitch accent, contrast, and givenness. Explore how speakers use prosodic prominence to signal information structure in natural conversation, analyzing the acoustic correlates of pitch accent and their connection to discourse-level phenomena. Investigate the role of contrast and givenness in determining which words receive prominence, and discover how these linguistic concepts manifest in the speech signal. Examine computational approaches to automatically detecting and predicting prominence patterns in conversational data, with implications for speech recognition, synthesis, and natural language processing applications.