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<Paper uid="W97-1208">
  <Title>Looking for the presence of linguistic concepts in the prosody of spoken utterances</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="57" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Methodological description
2.1 Idea
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Prosodic function has been discussed frequently, e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> \[Bar81,Leo70,Koh87\]. One major problem is the separation of prosodic and segmental influences. In applications with no control over spectral qualities: such as time-domain concatenative synthesis systems, only prosodic parameters can be modified to convey linguistic concepts. To qualify and quantify the information contained in the prosody~ we use specially designed perception tests. The segmental information in the stimuli is removed: in order to make sure that all information is carried by the prosody alone.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Choice of stimuli
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Many previous experiments on prosody have been forced to employ ambiguous test sentences or words which is clearly suboptimal. With our method the semantic content of the stimuli becomes irrelevant to the test results and the optimal stimuli for a given task can be used. Also, the stinmli can be extracted from a read text or from a natural dialogue situation: as long as the quality of the recording is not too degraded.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.3 Stimuli manipulation
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> A stimulus is constructed on the basis of the points of glottal excitation (pitchmarks) of the original signal while preserving the energy. The manipulated stinmli contain only prosodic information: F0 contour, temporal structure and energy distribution.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Thus, they reflect exactly the parameters that can be varied using PSOLA \[Mou90\]. Different stimulus manipulation methods have been compared in the validation test series (3).</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="57" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.4 Test procedure
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Depending on the aim of the investigation: the manipulated stimuli are presented either with or with- null out the original sentence in writing.` and either with or without visual representation. The proposed method is not tied to a specific test setting. Various examples of successful test procedures are reported in this paper, and more settings can easily be developed. The questions the subject has to answer can be very simple, aimed directly at the linguistic function in question. There is no need to instruct the subject to listen only to the prosody.` as he/she will hear nothing else.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>