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Previous research has shown that differences in the marking of prosodic boundaries exist not only between varieties of the same language, but also between speaking styles of the same variety. Our aim is to gain insights into how these two factors interact in the case of German and Austrian German read and conversational speech. Analysing four acoustic cues, representing durational and fundamental frequency (f0) measures, we observed that pause duration was the strongest cue to prosodic boundaries and that f0 reset was the weakest, in both varieties and across speaking styles. In read speech however, we noticed differences between the two varieties in the weighting given to the four cues. We then employed the four investigated acoustic cues for the annotation of the less-resourced variety, by examining ways of exploiting resources from the more well-resourced variety. Testing three automatic approaches for boundary detection, we obtained an overall high performance: 82.4% and 76.6% F-score for read and conversational speech, respectively. Moreover, our results showed that training on more data from the well-resourced variety did not outperform the same system trained on less data from the target variety. • Prosodic boundaries in German and Austrian German, read and conversational speech. • Pause is the strongest cue, f0 reset is the weakest. • Cues weighting is more similar in conversational speech between the two varieties. • Automatic detection systems using the cues performed well on both speaking styles. • Training in variety-mismatched condition was not better than matched condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pluricentric languages are languages that are spoken in at least two countries where they have an official function and thus develop national varieties with specific linguistic and pragmatic features. Presently 43 languages have been identified as belonging to this category, for instance, English, Spanish, German, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. This article forms an introduction to the special issue "Pluricentric Languages in Speech Science and Technology" by giving an overview of current challenges with respect to the development of speech and language resources, annotation and analysis tools, as well as speech technology services for pluricentric languages. The article discusses potential solutions that come from cross-fertilization: on the one hand, how phonetic and linguistic knowledge may contribute to advancements in speech technology, and on the other, how speech technology may facilitate phonetic and linguistic studies on pluricentric languages. In our discussion, we include the research methods and findings of the eight research articles of this special issue and point towards promising paths for future research in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chichimec (Otomanguean) has two tones, high and low, and a phonological three-way phonation contrast: modal /V/, breathy / V ¨ /, and creaky / V ̃ /. Tone and phonation type contrasts are used independently. This paper investigates the acoustic realization of modal, breathy, and creaky vowels; the timing of phonation in non-modal vowels; and the production of tone in combination with different phonation types. The results of cepstral peak prominence and three spectral tilt measures showed that phonation type contrasts are not distinguished by the same acoustic measures for women and men. In line with expectations for laryngeally complex languages, phonetic modal and non-modal phonation are sequenced in phonological breathy and creaky vowels. With respect to the timing pattern, however, the results show that non-modal phonation is not, as previously reported, mainly located in the middle of the vowel. Non-modal phonation is, instead, predominantly realized in the second half of phonological breathy and creaky vowels. Tone is distinguished in all three phonation types, and non-modal vowels do not exhibit distinct F0 ranges except for creaky vowels produced by women in which F0 declines in the creaky portion. The results of the acoustic analysis provide additional insights to phonological accounts of laryngeal complexity in Chichimec. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homophones pose serious issues for automatic speech recognition (ASR) as they have the same pronunciation but different meanings or spellings. Homophone disambiguation is usually done within a stochastic language model or by an analysis of the homophonous word’s context, similarly to word sense disambiguation. Whereas this method reaches good results in read speech, it fails in conversational, spontaneous speech, where utterances are often short, contain disfluencies and/or are realized syntactically incomplete. Phonetic studies, however, have shown that words that are homophonous in read speech often differ in their phonetic detail in spontaneous speech. Whereas humans use phonetic detail to disambiguate homophones, this linguistic information is usually not explicitly incorporated into ASR systems. In this paper, we show that phonetic detail can be used to automatically disambiguate homophones using the example of German pronouns. Using 3179 homophonous tokens from a corpus of spontaneous German and a set of acoustic features, we trained a random forest model. Our results show that homophones can be disambiguated reasonably well using acoustic features (74% F 1 , 92% accuracy). In particular, this model is able to outperform a model based on lexical context (48% F 1 , 89% accuracy). This paper is of relevance for speech technologists and linguists: amodule using phonetic detail similar to the presented model is suitable to be integrated in ASR systems in order to improve recognition. An approach similar to the work here that combines the automatic extraction of acoustic features with statistical analysis is suitable to be integrated in phonetic analysis aiming at finding out more about the contribution and interplay of acoustic features for functional categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents GRASS (Graz corpus of Read and Spontaneous Speech), the first large scale speech database for Austrian German with both read and conversational speech. In total, the corpus contains approximately 1900 min of speech in which 38 speakers produced more than 220,000 word tokens from 14,593 different word types. The corpus consists of three components. First, the Conversational Speech Component contains free conversations of one hour length between friends, colleagues, couples, or family members. Second, the Commands Component contains commands and keywords which were either read or elicited by pictures. Third, the Read Speech Component contains phonetically balanced sentences and digits. The speech of all components has been recorded at fullband quality in a soundproof recording-studio with head-mounted microphones, large-diaphragm microphones, a laryngograph, and with a video camera. The corpus was fully annotated at the orthographic level, and partly also at the segmental, sub-segmental and prosodic level. Our analysis of conversational speech characteristics such as overlapping speech, laughter, repetitions, hesitations and the use of colloquial and dialectal words allows us to conclude that the conversational speech material is highly casual in nature. The collected corpus provides conversational material for phoneticians and linguists interested in topics specific for Austrian German (e.g., pronunciation variability, prosody, syntax of spoken Austrian German), and for those studying talk in interaction in general (turn-taking, grounding, entrainment, extra-linguistic factors etc.). Furthermore, it is a valuable resource for speech technologists interested in the development of ASR and dialogue systems for different speaking styles of Austrian German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superficially, read and spontaneous speech—the two main kinds of training data for automatic speech recognition—appear as complementary, but are equal: pairs of texts and acoustic signals. Yet, spontaneous speech is typically harder for recognition. This is usually explained by different kinds of variation and noise, but there is a more fundamental deviation at play: for read speech, the audio signal is produced by recitation of the given text, whereas in spontaneous speech, the text is transcribed from a given signal. In this review, we embrace this difference by presenting a first introduction of causal reasoning into automatic speech recognition, and describing causality as a tool to study speaking styles and training data. After breaking down the data generation processes of read and spontaneous speech and analysing the domain from a causal perspective, we highlight how data generation by annotation must affect the interpretation of inference and performance. Our work discusses how various results from the causality literature regarding the impact of the direction of data generation mechanisms on learning and prediction apply to speech data. Finally, we argue how a causal perspective can support the understanding of models in speech processing regarding their behaviour, capabilities, and limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the realization of word-final /t/ in conversational standard Dutch. First, based on a large number of word tokens (6747) annotated with broad phonetic transcription by an automatic transcription tool, we show that morphological properties of the words and their position in the utterance''s syntactic structure play a role for the presence versus absence of their final /t/. We also replicate earlier findings on the role of predictability (word frequency and bigram frequency with the following word) and provide a detailed analysis of the role of segmental context. Second, we analyze the detailed acoustic properties of word-final /t/ on the basis of a smaller number of tokens (486) which were annotated manually. Our data show that word and bigram frequency as well as segmental context also predict the presence of sub-phonemic properties. The investigations presented in this paper extend research on the realization of /t/ in spontaneous speech and have potential consequences for psycholinguistic models of speech production and perception as well as for automatic speech recognition systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In spontaneous, conversational speech, words are often reduced compared to their citation forms, such that a word like yesterday may sound like . The present chapter investigates such acoustic reduction. The study of reduction needs large corpora that are transcribed phonetically. The first part of this chapter describes an automatic transcription procedure used to obtain such a large phonetically transcribed corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues, which is subsequently used for the investigation of acoustic reduction. First, the orthographic transcriptions were adapted for automatic processing. Next, the phonetic transcription of the corpus was created by means of a forced alignment using a lexicon with multiple pronunciation variants per word. These variants were generated by applying phonological and reduction rules to the canonical phonetic transcriptions of the words. The second part of this chapter reports the results of a quantitative analysis of reduction in the corpus on the basis of the generated transcriptions and gives an inventory of segmental reductions in standard Dutch. Overall, we found that reduction is more pervasive in spontaneous Dutch than previously documented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• first analysis of prosodic configurations mapped to information structural categories in Egyptian Arabic. • statistical analysis of holistic f0 contours with GAMMs and analysis of the interaction of acoustic features across the utterance with FPCA. • results yield a tentative prosodic focus-background construction across speakers, which is not applied by all speakers and thus not fully conventionalized for this specific purpose. • high inter-speaker variability is found and speaker-specific strategies are identified through reconstructions for individual speakers using FPCA. This paper investigates the prosody of sentences elicited in three Information Structure (IS) conditions: all-new, theme-rheme and rhematic focus-background. The sentences were produced by 18 speakers of Egyptian Arabic (EA). This is the first quantitative study to provide a comprehensive analysis of holistic f0 contours (by means of GAMM) and configurations of f0, duration and intensity (by means of FPCA) associated with the three IS conditions, both across and within speakers. A significant difference between focus-background and the other information structure conditions was found, but also strong inter-speaker variation in terms of strategies and the degree to which these strategies were applied. The results suggest that post-focus register lowering and the duration of the stressed syllables of the focused and the utterance-final word are more consistent cues to focus than a higher peak of the focus accent. In addition, some independence of duration and intensity from f0 could be identified. These results thus support the assumption that, when focus is marked prosodically in EA, it is marked by prominence. Nevertheless, the fact that a considerable number of EA speakers did not apply prosodic marking and the fact that prosodic focus marking was gradient rather than categorical suggest that EA does not have a fully conventionalized prosodic focus construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the nature of reduction phenomena in informal speech. It addresses the question whether reduction processes that affect many word types, but only if they occur in connected informal speech, may be categorical in nature. The focus is on reduction of schwa in the prefixes and on word-final /t/ in Dutch past participles. More than 2000 tokens of past participles from the Ernestus Corpus of Spontaneous Dutch and the Spoken Dutch Corpus (both from the interview and read speech component) were transcribed automatically. The results demonstrate that the presence and duration of /t/ are affected by approximately the same phonetic variables, indicating that the absence of /t/ is the extreme result of shortening, and thus results from a gradient reduction process. Also for schwa, the data show that mainly phonetic variables influence its reduction but its presence is affected by different and more variables than its duration, which suggests that the absence of schwa may result from gradient as well as categorical processes. These conclusions are supported by the distributions of the segments' durations. These findings provide evidence that reduction phenomena which affect many words in informal conversations may also result from categorical reduction processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm, based on vocalic and intervocalic interval durations, are intended to capture stable typological differences between languages. They should consequently be robust to variation between speakers, sentence materials, and measurers. This paper assesses the impact of these sources of variation on the metrics %V (proportion of utterance comprised of vocalic intervals), VarcoV (rate-normalized standard deviation of vocalic interval duration), and nPVI-V (a measure of the durational variability between successive pairs of vocalic intervals). Five measurers analyzed the same corpus of speech: five sentences read by six speakers of Standard Southern British English. Differences between sentences were responsible for the greatest variation in rhythm scores. Inter-speaker differences were also a source of significant variability. However, there was relatively little variation due to segmentation differences between measurers following an agreed protocol. An automated phone alignment process was also used: Rhythm scores thus derived showed good agreement with the human measurers. A number of recommendations for researchers wishing to exploit contrastive rhythm metrics are offered in conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]