Antonis Botinis

Developments and paradigms in intonation research

Abstract The present tutorial paper is addressed to a wide audience with different discipline backgrounds as well as variable expertise on intonation. The paper is structured into five sections. In Section 1 , “ Introduction ”, basic concepts of intonation and prosody are summarised and cornerstones of intonation research are highlighted. In Section 2 , “ Functions and forms of intonation ”, a wide range of functions from morpholexical and phrase levels to discourse and dialogue levels are discussed and forms of intonation with examples from different languages are presented. In Section 3 , “ Modelling and labelling of intonation ”, established models of intonation as well as labelling systems are presented. In Section 4 , “ Applications of intonation ”, the most widespread applications of intonation and especially technological ones are presented and methodological issues are discussed. In Section 5 , “ Research perspective ” research avenues and ultimate goals as well as the significance and benefits of intonation research in the upcoming years are outlined.

Contrastive Tonal Analysis of Focus Perception in Greek and Swedish

The present study is an experimental investigation of Greek and Swedish tonal perception of focus. Focus is a complex category involving a variety of linguistic correlates, among them, phonetic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic ones (Halliday, 1967;Bresnan, 1971;Chomsky, 1971;Jackendoff, 1972;Rossi, Di Cristo, Hirst, Martin & Nishinuma, 1981;Gussenhoven, 1983;Ladd, 1996;Lambrecht, 1996;Cruttenden, 1997). The study is concentrated on the phonetics of focus and in particular on tonal perception of voice fundamental frequency (Fo), or pitch. Focus, and fairly synonymous terms such as nucleus and sentence stress, have been studied extensively and the results indicate both local and global tonal realisation (e.g. Bruce, 1977;Pierrehumbert, 1980;Garding, Botinis & Touati, 1982;Botinis, 1989;Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998.

Temporal and acoustic characteristics of Greek vowels produced by adults with cerebral palsy

The present investigation examined the temporal and spectral characteristics of Greek vowels as produced by speakers with intact (NO) versus cerebral palsy affected (CP) neuromuscular systems. Six NO and six CP native speakers of Greek produced the Greek vowels [i, e, a, o, u] in the first syllable of CVCV nonsense words in a short carrier phrase. Stress could be on either the first or second syllable. There were three female and three male speakers in each group. In terms of temporal characteristics, the results showed that: vowels produced by CP speakers were longer than vowels produced by NO speakers; stressed vowels were longer than unstressed vowels; vowels produced by female speakers were longer than vowels produced by male speakers. In terms of spectral characteristics the results showed that the vowel space of the CP speakers was smaller than that of the NO speakers. This is similar to the results recently reported by Liu et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 3879‐3889 (2005)] for CP speakers of Mandar...