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Stroke can negatively affect a person’s ability to utilize properly acoustic measurements as a cue to prosody at the sentence level. The objective of this study was to determine the nature of the prosodic disturbances in Persian Broca’s aphasics at the sentence level in the framework of Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology. The subjects of this experimental study included three Persian-speaking males. They were selected by simple purposive sampling method from patients directed to the speech therapy unit in the Ghaem Educational, Research and Treatment Centre (Mashhad, Iran). Aphasic subjects sustained a lesion to the left hemisphere and particularly to the Fronto-temporal region. Acoustic measurements of duration, intensity, and terminal components of fundamental frequency (F0) that distinguish statements from their yes-no question counterparts were examined in the reading task in Persian-speaking aphasic patients. The findings of the present research revealed that the aphasic individuals were able to produce statements from their yes-no question counterparts in terms of terminal components of fundamental frequency (F0); however, they demonstrated a poorer performance than the control group. So, generally speaking, the present study confirms that linguistic ability of Persian-speaking aphasic patients to differentiate statements from questions may be preserved to some extent. The findings also support the notion that the left hemisphere may be important in the production of prosody and the Fronto-temporal region is sensitive to sentence-level prosodic contours.

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Gholam-Hossein Gholamhosseinzadeh, Ph.D.
Hamed Norouzi
 
Abstract
In Holiday’s linguistic theory, one of the factors which lead to the conjunction of a text’s sentences is comparison. This factor, in addition to personal and allusive reference, forms three types of references in this theory; since according to Holiday when two things are compared with each other, they are actually referred to each other. Comparative reference is an indirect reference to alikeness, difference or the similarity of the referential factors. This type of reference is divided into two parts; common and particular. The common comparative reference is divided into three parts; alikeness, similarity and difference. Due to the high significance and precise survey of simile in the Persian language, an attempt has been made to mention the common points of this issue in the Persian literature and the Holiday theory. Holiday has also divided particular comparative reference into two parts; counting ones and descriptive ones. But in here the authors have added the comparative one to it too as a result of common comparison and the potential and possibility of comparison through simile in the Persian language. Based on Holiday’s theory, cohesion has other factors besides reference; 1) substitution and omission, 2) vocabulary coherence 3) relevance.
Since the author is studying the Persian language, he has added other factors which have a role in equilibrium of syntactical cohesion. As this discussion has a high scope, only one of the factors is discussed in here; comparative reference.
 
            

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The process of language change is an inseparable feature of the inherent nature of every language. This change is so slow and delicate that it will be tangible for the native speakers only after a long time and in comparison with the past. A diachronic outlook of the language is especially beneficial here. The present research seeks to examine the transition process of (negative or positive) semantic prosody of some presently neutral Persian verb compounds into connotation. To this end, different researches on semantic prosody, connotation and their transformation in different languages and especially in English are reviewed and the same trend is traced in some verb compounds in Persian. Two corpora from two different historical periods (12th century and modern Persian) of language data were compiled and the semantic prosody of seven verb compound was established in the two. The results show that the semantic prosody of some of these compounds have changed from positive to negative over time and this negative semantic prosody in some of the compounds especially mojeb shodan (cause) is changing to negative connotation.

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Speech emotion can add more information to speech in comparison to available textual information. However, it will also lead to some problems in speech recognition process. In a previous study, we depicted the substantial changes of speech parameters caused by speech emotion. Therefore, in order to improve emotional speech recognition rate, in a first step, the effects of emotion on speech parameters should be evaluated and in the next steps, emotional speech recognition accuracy be improved through application of suitable parameters. The changes in speech parameters, i.e. formant frequencies and pitch frequency, due to anger and grief were evaluated for Farsi language in our former research. In this research, using those results, we try to improve emotional speech recognition accuracy using baseline models. We show that adding parameters such as formant and pitch frequencies to the speech feature vector can improve recognition accuracy. The amount of improvement depends on parameter type, number of mixture components and the emotional condition. Proper identification of emotional condition can also help in improving speech recognition accuracy. To recognize emotional condition of speech, formant and pitch frequencies were used successfully in two different approaches, namley decision tree and GMM.

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There have been disagreements on the number of original Khayyam’s Quatrains (rubaiyat). Stylistics approaches can help to distinguish the original Quatrains. The prosody has the ability to show some stylistic characteristics. Although the main goal of this study is to find the prosodic style of Khayyam’s Quatrains by determining the Frequency of prosodic factors, there was no way to study prosody of Quatrains in general. The history of finding the main meter of Quatrain is studied in critical view. The results show that the frequencies of prosodic factors is effective and useful in realizing Khayyam’s personal style. Some prosodic factors have high frequencies and others have low frequencies: three long syllables is not used as the first foot generally; In the second foot, two short syllables are not substituted with one long syllable. %95 of Quatrains have composed in just 4 meters. 256 prosodic patterns could be distinguished on the whole.