The Future of Prosody: It's about Time
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Prosody is usually defined in terms of the three distinct but interacting domains of pitch, intensity and duration patterning, or, more generally, as phonological and phonetic properties of 'suprasegmentals', speech segments which are larger than consonants and vowels. Rather than taking this approach, the concept of multiple time domains for prosody processing is taken up, and methods of time domain analysis are discussed: annotation mining with timing dispersion measures, time tree induction, oscillator models in phonology and phonetics, and finally the use of the Amplitude Envelope Modulation Spectrum (AEMS). While frequency demodulation (in the form of pitch tracking) is a central issue in prosodic analysis, in the present context, it is amplitude envelope demodulation long time domain spectra which are focused. Using this method, multiple rhythms are described as multiple frequency zones in the AEMS, a new Frequency Zone Hypothesis of rhythm, and pointers to research fields beyond the time domains of foot, syllable and mora are outlined.
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