How F0 Contours Reflect Speech Nuclear Events

The paper proposes a cognitive model of information structure in order to deduce the structure and the nuclear element hierarchy of intonational contours. We formulate the hypothesis that speech information items are packed at the cortical level into cognitive relations that are reflected at the utterance level by prosodic phrases (relations). Thus, the prominence and nuclear events has meaning at the cortical representation level and the cognitive model of information structure that already has presented in [3] is proposed for their interpretation in relationship with acoustic cues of the related prosodic constituents. In this paper we reformulate the nucleus identification rules of the cognitive model and illustrate their application in several distinct cases of phrase accentuations: phrases without prominence and phrases with one or phrase with two prominent constituents.