Speech Prosody

Speech prosody concerns the patterns of pitch, stress, rhythm, duration, and pausing that shape how speech is understood. Researchers analyze acoustic contours and phonological annotations, probe self-supervised speech representations, and build neural systems that predict or control prosodic features in tasks such as text-to-speech, tone recognition, and pronunciation assessment. Evaluation spans multilingual stress and tone tests, emotional speech perception, dialogue and translation, and comparisons with human judgments. A central challenge is that models may encode prosodic cues without reliably using or reproducing them, especially when fine-grained meaning depends on context, language, or speaker.