Teenage and Adult Speech in School Context: Building and Processing a Corpus of European Portuguese

We present a corpus of European Portuguese spoken by teenagers and adults in school context, CPE-FACES, with an overview of the differential characteristics of high school oral presentations and the challenges this data poses to automatic speech processing. The CPE-FACES corpus has been created with two main goals: to provide a resource for the study of prosodic patterns in both spontaneous and prepared unscripted speech, and to capture inter-speaker and speaking style variations common at school, for research on oral presentations. Research on speaking styles is still largely based on adult speech. References to teenagers are sparse and cross-analyses of speech types comparing teenagers and adults are rare. We expect CPE-FACES, currently a unique resource in this domain, will contribute to filling this gap in European Portuguese. Focusing on disfluencies and phrase-final phonetic-phonological processes we show the impact of teenage speech on the automatic segmentation of oral presentations. Analyzing fluent final intonation contours in declarative utterances, we also show that communicative situation specificities, speaker status and cross gender differences are key factors in speaking style variation at school.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Teenage and adult speech in school context: building and processing a corpus of European Portuguese

We present a corpus of European Portuguese spoken by teenagers and adults in school context, CPE-FACES, with an overview of the differential characteristics of high school oral presentations and the challenges this data poses to automatic speech processing. The CPE-FACES corpus has been created with two main goals: to provide a resource for the study of prosodic patterns in both spontaneous and prepared unscripted speech, and to capture inter-speaker and speaking style variations common at school, for research on oral presentations. Research on speaking styles is still largely based on adult speech. References to teenagers are sparse and cross-analyses of speech types comparing teenagers and adults are rare. We expect CPE-FACES, currently a unique resource in this domain, will contribute to filling this gap in European Portuguese. Focusing on disfluencies and phrase-final phonetic-phonological processes we show the impact of teenage speech on the automatic segmentation of oral presentations. Analyzing fluent final intonation contours in declarative utterances, we also show that communicative situation specificities, speaker status and cross-gender differences are key factors in speaking style variation at school.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no-interrogatives of Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011; Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan- and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no-interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development

Prosodic, syntactic, semantic guidelines for topic structures across domains and corpora

This paper presents the annotation guidelines applied to naturally occurring speech, aiming at an integrated account of contrast and parallel structures in European Portuguese. These guidelines were defined to allow for the empirical study of interactions among intonation and syntax-discourse patterns in selected sets of different corpora (monologues and dialogues, by adults and teenagers). In this paper we focus on the multilayer annotation process of left periphery structures by using a small sample of highly spontaneous speech in which the distinct types of topic structures are displayed. The analysis of this sample provides fundamental training andtesting material for further application in a wider range of domains and corpora. The annotation process comprises the following time-linked levels (manual and automatic): phone, syllable and word level transcriptions (including co-articulation effects); tonal events and break levels; part-of-speech tagging; syntactic-discourse patterns (construction type; construction position; syntactic function; discourse function), and disfluency events as well. Speech corpora with such a multi-level annotation are a valuable resource to look into grammar module relations in language use from an integrated viewpoint. Such viewpoint is innovative in our language, and has not been often assumed by studies for other languages

Prosodic, syntactic, semantic guidelines for topic structures across domains and corpora

This paper presents the annotation guidelines applied to naturally occurring speech, aiming at an integrated account of contrast and parallel structures in European Portuguese. These guidelines were defined to allow for the empirical study of interactions among intonation and syntax-discourse patterns in selected sets of different corpora (monologues and dialogues, by adults and teenagers). In this paper we focus on the multilayer annotation process of left periphery structures by using a small sample of highly spontaneous speech in which the distinct types of topic structures are displayed. The analysis of this sample provides fundamental training and testing material for further application in a wider range of domains and corpora. The annotation process comprises the following time-linked levels (manual and automatic): phone, syllable and word level transcriptions (including co-articulation effects); tonal events and break levels; part-of-speech tagging; syntactic-discourse patterns (construction type; construction position; syntactic function; discourse function), and disfluency events as well. Speech corpora with such a multi-level annotation are a valuable resource to look into grammar module relations in language use from an integrated viewpoint. Such viewpoint is innovative in our language, and has not been often assumed by studies for other languages.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Prosodic, syntactic, semantic guidelines for topic structures across domains and corpora

This paper presents the annotation guidelines applied to naturally occurring speech, aiming at an integrated account of contrast and parallel structures in European Portuguese. These guidelines were defined to allow for the empirical study of interactions among intonation and syntax-discourse patterns in selected sets of different corpora (monologues and dialogues, by adults and teenagers). In this paper we focus on the multilayer annotation process of left periphery structures by using a small sample of highly spontaneous speech in which the distinct types of topic structures are displayed. The analysis of this sample provides fundamental training and testing material for further application in a wider range of domains and corpora. The annotation process comprises the following time-linked levels (manual and automatic): phone, syllable and word level transcriptions (including co-articulation effects); tonal events and break levels; part-of-speech tagging; syntactic-discourse patterns (construction type; construction position; syntactic function; discourse function), and disfluency events as well. Speech corpora with such a multi-level annotation are a valuable resource to look into grammar module relations in language use from an integrated viewpoint. Such viewpoint is innovative in our language, and has not been often assumed by studies for other languages.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Euskararen bariazioa eta bariazioaren irakaskuntza - II

144 p.Aurkibidea: - Sarrera (Iglesias, A.; Romero, A.; Ensunza, A.). - Transcribing intonation with ETI_TOBI (Elvira-García, W.). - Diatech tresna informatikoaren bertsio berria (Aurrekoetxea, G.; Iglesias, A.; Santander, G.; Usobiaga, I.). - Euskararen bariazio geo-morfologiaren azterketa (Videgain, X.; Aurrekoetxea, G.). - Subject pronoun expression in Basque: description and pedagogical implications (Sainz-Maza, L.; Rodríguez, I.). - Bariazio prosodikoaren eragina testu irakurrien ulermenean (Etxebarria, A.; Romero, A.; Gaminde, I.; Garay, U.). - Dos décadas de dialectometría entonativa (Roseano, P.). - Euskaldun berrien eta zaharren ulermena jarreren inguruan (Asensio, N.; Barrios, H.; Lázaro, A.; Sáez, I.). - Hizkuntza-aldaketaren inguruko jarrera eta prestigioaz (Ensunza, A.). - Keinuen eta bokalizazioen arteko harremanak komunikazio-funtzio goiztiarretan: ELAN softwarea erabiliz (Romero, A.; Etxebarria, A.; De Pablo, I.; Sanz, A.). - Hizkuntza aldakortasuna Larrabetzuko aditz morfologian (Etxebarria, A.; Gaminde, I.; Olalde, A.; Gaminde, U.). - Bizkaiko aditz laguntzaileen bilakaeraren azterketaz (Gaminde, I.; Romero, A.; Etxebarria, A.; Eguskiza, N.)

Cross-language differences in fundamental frequency range: a comparison of English and German

This paper presents a systematic comparison of various measures of f0 range in female speakers of English and German. F0 range was analysed along two dimensions, level (i.e. overall f0 height) and span (extent of f0 modulation within a given speech sample). These were examined using two types of measures, one based on 'long-term distributional' (LTD) methods, and the other based on specific landmarks in speech that are linguistic in nature ('linguistic' measures). The various methods were used to identify whether and on what basis or bases speakers of these two languages differ in f0 range. Findings yielded significant cross-language differences in both dimensions of f0 range, but effect sizes were found to be larger for span than for level, and for linguistic than for LTD measures. The linguistic measures also uncovered some differences between the two languages in how f0 range varies through an intonation contour. This helps shed light on the relation between intonational structure and f0 range.caslAltenberg, E. P., and Ferrand, C. T. (2006). Fundamental frequency in monolingual English, bilingual English=Russian, and bilingual English- Cantonese young adult women,- J. Voice 20(1), 89-96. Awan, S. N., and Mueller, P. B. (1996). Speaking fundamental frequency characteristics of white, African American, and Hispanic kindergartners,- J. Speech. Hear. Res. 39(3), 573-577. Baken, R. J., and Orlikoff, R. F. (2000). Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice, 2nd ed. (Singular Publishing Group, San Diego, CA). Banse, R., and Scherer, K. R. (1996). Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression,- J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 70(3), 614-636. Beckman, M., and Ayers Elam, G. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI Labeling, version 3 (Ohio State University, Ohio). Benjamini, Y., and Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate-a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing,- J. R. Statist. Soc. B 57(1), 289-300. Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2007). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (version 4.6) [computer program],- http:==www.praat.org= (Last viewed May 14, 2007). Breen, M., Dilley, L. C., Kraemer, J., and Gibson, E. (2012). Inter-transcriber agreement for two systems of prosodic annotation: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch),- Corpus Linguist. Linguist. Theory (in press). Brown, A., and Docherty, G. J. (1995). Phonetic variation in dysarthric speech as a function of sampling task,- Eur. J. Disord. Commun. 30(1), 17-35. Chen, S. H. (2005). The effects of tones on speaking frequency and intensity ranges in Mandarin and Min dialects,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117(5), 3225-3230. Clark-Carter, D. (1997). Doing Quantitative Psychological Research: From Design to Report (Psychology Press, Hove, East Sussex). Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient for agreement for nominal scales,- Educ. Psychol. Meas. 20, 37-46. Deutsch, D., Le, J., Shen, J., and Henthorn, T. (2009). The pitch levels of female speech in two Chinese villages,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125(5), EL208-EL213. Diehl, J. J., Watson, D., Bennetto, L., Mcdonough, J., and Gunlogson, C. (2009). An acoustic analysis of prosody in high-functioning autism,- Appl. Psycholinguist. 30(3), 385-404. Dilley, L. C., and Brown, M. (2007). Effects of pitch range variation on f0 extrema in an imitation task,- J. Phonetics 35(4), 523-551. Dolson, M. (1994). The pitch of speech as a function of linguistic community,- Music. Percept. 11(3), 321-331. Eady, S. J. (1982). Differences in the F0 patterns of speech: Tone language versus stress language,- Lang. Speech 25, 29-42. Eckert, H., and Laver, J. (1994). Menschen und ihre Stimmen: Aspekte der vokalen Kommunikation (Humans and their Voices: Aspects of Vocal Communication) (Psychologie Verlags Union, Weinheim). Escudero, D., Aguilar, L., Vanrell, M. M., and Prieto, P. (2012). Analysis of inter-transcriber consistency in the Cat_ToBI prosodic labelling system,- Speech Communications, retrieved from http:==prosodia.upf. edu=home=arxiu=publicacions=escudero-et-al_analysis-intertranscriberconsistency- cattobi.pdf (Last viewed December 21, 2011). Field, A. (2005). Discovering Statistics using SPSS, 2nd ed. (SAGE Publications, London). Gibbon, D. (1998). German Intonation,- in Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages, edited by D. J. Hirst and A. Di Christo (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 78-95. Grabe, E. (1998). Comparative intonational phonology: English and German,- Ph.D. thesis, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, Max Planck Institute Series in Psycholinguistics No. 7, Wageningen, Ponsen en Looien. Gussenhoven, C., Repp, B. H., Rietveld, A., Rump, H. H., and Terken, J. (1997). The perceptual prominence of fundamental frequency peaks,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102(5), 3009-3022. Hanley, T. D., Snidecor, J. C., and Ringel, R. L. (1967). Some acoustic differences among languages,- Phonetica 14, 97-107. Hirschberg, J., and Ward, G. (1992). The influence of pitch range, duration, amplitude, and spectral features on the interpretation of the rise fall rise intonation contour in English,- J. Phonetics 20(2), 241-251. Hollien, H., Hollien, P. A., and de Jong, G. (1997). Effects of three parameters on speaking fundamental frequency,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102(5), 2984-2992. Hubbard, K., and Trauner, D. A. (2007). Intonation and emotion in autistic spectrum disorders,- J. Psycholinguist. Res. 36(2), 159-173. Keating, P., and Kuo, G. (2010). Comparison of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin,- UCLA Work. Papers Phonetics 108, 164-187. Kreiman, J., and Van Lancker Sidtis, D. (2011). Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception (John Wiley and Sons, Chichester). Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational Phonology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Ladd, D. R., Silverman, K. E. A., Tolkmitt, F., Bergmann, G., and Scherer, K. R. (1985). Evidence for the independent function of intonation contour type, voice quality, and F0 range in signaling speaker affect,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 78(2), 435-444. Landis, J., and Koch, G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data,- Biometrics 33(1), 159-174. Liberman, M., and Pierrehumbert, J. (1984). Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length,- in Language Sound Structure, edited by M. Aronoff, R. Oehrle, F. Kelley, and B. W. Stephens (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 157-233. Majewski, W., Hollien, H., and Zalewski, J. (1972). Speaking fundamental frequency of Polish adult males,- Phonetica 25(2), 119-125. Mangold, M., and Grebe, P. (2005). Duden Ausspracheworterbuch (Duden Pronunciation Dictionary), 6th ed. (Dudenverlag, Mannheim). Nishio, M., and Niimi, S. (2008). Changes in speaking fundamental frequency characteristics with aging,- Folia Phoniatr. Logo. 60(3), 120-127. NIST=SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods, (2010). http:==www.itl.nist.gov=div898=handbook= (Last viewed October 26, 2010). Patterson, D. (2000). A linguistic approach to pitch range modelling,- Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. Pierrehumbert, J. (1979). Perception of fundamental-frequency declination,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 66(2), 363-369. Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation,- Ph.D. thesis, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Rendall, D., Vokey, J. R., and Nemeth, C. (2007). Lifting the curtain on the Wizard of Oz: Biased voice-based impressions of speaker size,- J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 33(5), 1208-1219. Sobin, C., and Alpert, M. (1999). Emotion in speech: The acoustic attributes of fear, anger, sadness, and joy,- J. Psycholinguist. Res. 28(4), 347-365. Terken, J. (1994). Fundamental-frequency and perceived prominence of accented syllables II: Nonfinal accents,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95(6), 3662-3665. 't Hart, J., Collier, R., and Cohen, A. (1990). A Perceptual Study of Intonation (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Van Bezooijen, R. (1995). Sociocultural aspects of pitch differences between Japanese and Dutch women,- Lang. Speech 38, 253-265. Van Dommelen, W. A., and Moxness, B. H. (1995). Acoustic parameters in speaker height and weight identification: Sex-specific behaviour,- Lang. Speech 38, 267-287. Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), Vols. 1-3. Yoon, T., Chavarria, S., Cole, J., and Hasegawa, M. (2004). Intertranscriber reliability of prosodic labeling on telephone conversation using ToBI,- Proc. Interspeech 2004, 2729-2732.131pub2622pub

Prosódia, variação e processamento automático

Neste capítulo apresentamos um olhar panorâmico sobre a variação prosódica e sobre a sua interface com a área do processamento automático de fala. Tendo por base essencialmente a investigação que tem sido desenvolvida no português europeu sobre corpora de fala espontânea e preparada, em contextos de exposição e de interação, nomeadamente na variedade padrão falada em Lisboa, analisamos a variação da entoação em contextos declarativos e interrogativos, e abordamos as funções pragmáticodiscursivas que podem associar-se também a outros parâmetros prosódicos. Partindo de estudos comparativos inter-estilos (com maior/menor grau de espontaneidade e de planeamento, e natureza mais interativa/expositiva) e inter-falantes (espaço geográfico, género, grupo etário/estatuto), destacamos o papel da variação estilística e sociolinguística da prosódia no português europeu. Mostramos também o papel da variação no processamento automático de proeminência prosódica, pontuação, disfluências e emoções.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Methods in prosody

This book presents a collection of pioneering papers reflecting current methods in prosody research with a focus on Romance languages. The rapid expansion of the field of prosody research in the last decades has given rise to a proliferation of methods that has left little room for the critical assessment of these methods. The aim of this volume is to bridge this gap by embracing original contributions, in which experts in the field assess, reflect, and discuss different methods of data gathering and analysis. The book might thus be of interest to scholars and established researchers as well as to students and young academics who wish to explore the topic of prosody, an expanding and promising area of study